


The Antidote to Everything (Except for Me)

by SnitchesAndTalkers



Category: Bandom, Fall Out Boy
Genre: ... kind of, 2013, It just gets lost sometimes, Love is enduring, M/M, Magical Realism, Monumentour, Post-Hiatus, Smut, Soul Punk, Time Travel, Van Days, folie, midwestern gothic, modern fairy tale
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-20
Updated: 2019-02-23
Packaged: 2019-10-13 09:22:31
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 22,299
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17485499
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SnitchesAndTalkers/pseuds/SnitchesAndTalkers
Summary: Monumentour isn't going as well as Pete hoped it might; the old magic is missing and Patrick won't let go of past mistakes.Then Pete finds himself - quite literally - in the middle of Nowhere. And he's running out of time to find his way back out.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Hum My Name (My_Kind_of_Crazy)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/My_Kind_of_Crazy/gifts).



> Happy birthday to the wonderfully talented [Hum My Name](https://archiveofourown.org/users/My_Kind_of_Crazy/pseuds/Hum%20My%20Name)! This is my attempt at a modern day fairy tale, but with all the grit of the European originals! I really hope you enjoy it and that you have a wonderful day.
> 
> Also, a huge thank you to [the_chaotic_panda](https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_chaotic_panda/pseuds/the_chaotic_panda) and [Das_verlorene_Kind](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Das_verlorene_Kind/pseuds/Das_verlorene_Kind) for taking a look over the first chapter and letting me bounce ideas off them. You guys are awesome!
> 
> I hope you guys enjoy it!
> 
>  
> 
> [](https://www.flickr.com/photos/168268289@N03/46762465762/in/dateposted-public/)  
> 

Have you ever taken a road trip across the Midwest?

It’s endless enough to become disorienting, flat gold and brown stretching away to kiss the skyline in every direction you look. Highways and freeways looped through the landscape like dark gray ribbons around skin-pale wrists. You set the GPS for the horizon and wait for the next no name town to crawl from the cornfields with a dusty service station and a Denny’s that hasn’t changed since 1982.

It gets unsettling at night. The moon on the wheat, the scarecrows that seem to dare you to turn your back on them. Did you pass this town already? Is that farm familiar? Ghosts and ghosts and ghosts and burnt-dry fields and forests rich with the smell of decay.

It’s darkness. It’s something replacing your blood with its own. It’s caught between state lines and ley lines. It’s an echo of a scream that comes from something ancient and aching.

It’s something that sees you, even when you can’t see yourself in the mirror of another bathroom in another faceless truck stop.

It sees, knows, takes you.

And it has no intention of handing you back as whatever you were before.

*

They break down just outside of some Podunk town somewhere between Wichita and Tulsa.

There’s a faint line in the dirt at the side of the road, like someone came along and carved out the state lines so everyone would know. Patrick is sitting in Kansas on an upturned tire, Pete in Oklahoma with pebbles biting into his ass. Different states even though there’s only ten feet of dirt and bad feeling between them, orange-brown dust staining the bottom of their pant legs.

“This isn’t my fault,” says Pete petulantly. There’s a look on Patrick’s face that says he doesn’t think that’s true. Pete clarifies further. “I didn’t do anything.”

Staring at the horizon rather than at Pete, Patrick raises both shoulders. “No one said you did.”

It’s become less about what Patrick does say and more about what he doesn’t. His bad temper is infamous, his touch-the-bottom dives to plumb the very depths of his disposition during his creative process have earned Pete split lips and black eyes and smudged purple bruising back when they were kids. But this is less the irritability of creative genius and more genuine spite. Patrick hasn’t been this spiteful, this fist-clenched _mean_ , since Folie.

Wait, now that’s unfair. It’s okay. Everyone’s keyed up. They haven’t been able to get anything but country radio for three hours and no one’s 4G is working. It’s not hatred for _Pete_ , it’s temporary insanity induced by endless loops of Tammy Wynette and Conway Twitty. Probably.

“Does anyone have service?” Andy asks, halfway up a half-dead tree at the side of the highway. Pete checks his phone for the twenty-eighth time in ten minutes; no bars. He shakes his head. “Ninety-nine percent coverage up my fucking _ass_ , Verizon…”

“This isn’t something I can fix,” their bus driver — Mitch or Rich, something like that — declares from under the wheel arch, forehead wet with sweat and black with grease that he smudges across his skin with a swipe of his wrist, “I don’t know… it’s like someone took a tool kit to the whole thing while we were driving. We’re stuck here until the GPS picks us up and someone sends a mechanic. I can’t even find the fucking jack for the spare.”

“Wait, didn’t you and Joe have that a few days ago?” Patrick trails off, leaves it unsaid that he definitely saw Pete and Joe fucking around with the hydraulic lift in a parking lot just outside Houston. Pete stares very hard at the floor — he can probably summon a sinkhole if he wishes hard enough. Nothing happens. “You left it, didn’t you? Fantastic! You finally did it, you hit peak moron.”

“You say that about everything I do.”

“And yet you keep finding new ways to fucking surprise me.”

“In his defense,” Joe appears in the doorway, flip flops and hair hauled back in a bun. He’s sweating like he’s on tap. “I was the one who didn’t put it back.”

“Okay, so you’re _both_ assholes,” Patrick runs his hands through his hair and tips his hat down over his brow. Pete should’ve left him to find his own happiness in the face of middle-of-the-night blog entries, instead of hauling him back into the eye of this particular storm in the hopes of an easy, band-aid patch up. “What do you want? A fucking merit badge?”

“At least we didn’t crash,” says Andy helpfully, a little higher up the tree. Maybe he’s hoping to catch a ride on the vapor trails of passing airplanes. Maybe if Pete jumps into that endless blue, he can join him.

Joe finger guns in Andy’s direction. “Right? And like, at least the air-con is still working.” There’s a sickening, jarring sound of scraping metal from the back of the bus. Grinding, shearing noise and thick, coiled smoke then endless quiet. It sounds both broken and expensive to repair. Joe shares a look with the bus driver that suggests he now feels personally responsible. “Well, it _was_ …”

Patrick’s already sweating through his shirt, thick rings under his arms and gathering in spidering continents across the planes of his newly angular back. Pete’s got this half-hazed memory of a hotel in Bangkok or Tokyo, of Patrick pink and wet and desperately gulping syrup-sticky air. “We’ve coped with worse.”

Patrick fires him a look that suggests he ought to shut his mouth; Pete obliges.

“There’s a town,” Patrick’s shading his eyes against the Midwest glare, peering into the way the land shimmers along the horizon, “doesn’t look far. They’ll have a mechanic or, like, a _payphone_ at least.”

“Is that wise?” asks Pete, apparently unable to keep his mouth closed. “I hate to be a killjoy but maybe we should just stay with the bus—”

“I don’t _care_ what you _think_ ,” it’s impossible to tell if Patrick’s spitting sour lyrics back in his face or simply being melodramatic, “it’s a couple miles at most, and honestly? I’d rather spend my time doing something that feels productive than staring at the side of the bus with _you_.”

“Yeah?” Pete’s on his feet without specifically thinking about it. “You bitch and you moan and you fucking complain, just like you always did. You tell me I’m wrong and I’m dumb and I’m not good enough, just like you always did. You stand there, high and goddamn mighty and thinking you’re better than us, _just like you always did_. Why are you even _here_?”

“Because you fucking _asked_ and I still haven’t figured out how to say no to you!”

It could be — is _definitely_ — Pete’s imagination, but the line in the dirt seems to be moving. It’s less like a crack now, more like a scar burnt deep into the landscape between them. Joe and Andy have got this look, a shared resignation that The Damned Things second studio album will be going ahead sooner rather than later, after all. And Pete? Pete is fired with fury as he gestures in the direction of the highway, the town, the rest of the United States at large and snarls through gritted teeth.

“Take your high school attitude and shove it right up your ass, Patrick. No one fucking needs you here!” Patrick flinches back, reeling harder than if Pete sunk his fist into his stomach. It feels good. Good enough that Pete keeps going, keeps tossing out words like fists. “Go — find a phone, call up Bob and tell him the tour is the end of Fall Out Boy. No _hiatus_ , no fucking around, we’re through.”

Pete digs in his heels and stares Patrick down, watches him shape his mouth around more ammunition.

“You think you’re something, don’t you?” Patrick hisses, eyes narrowed. “You think I _need_ you, like my knight in shitty emo armor? We’re not kids anymore, _I’m_ not a kid anymore, and you can’t fucking impress me just by being you. I was an asshole back then, I’ve grown up, but you — you’re rotten right to the core.”

He’s got that look on his face; the one he gets when a melody isn’t sinking into the makeup of his DNA, the one that says he can’t find the pitch or the rhythm of the song haunting him when he tries to sleep. Pete curls his lip, bitter and ugly and spits out words that taste like venom. “Just fucking go.”

That crack is still there. Pete’s sure he can wedge the toe of his sneaker inside if he tries hard enough. He can slip through strata and tectonic plates until he hits the molten planetary core, melting up like ice cream, the red-brown earth vibrating under his feet.

Something beneath them is breathing, twitching, stirring and the world is static on a blown TV screen.

“I hate you,” Patrick mutters, low and certain.

And, because it hurts less than saying ‘I wish my heart could feel okay without yours’, Pete spits, “I wish I’d never fucking _met_ you.”

The hum in the humidity cuts. The world is still which makes the sharp intake of breath that burns Pete’s lungs echo and amplify. They stare one another down, Pete waits for an apology, wonders if he should give one, stays silent.

“Fine.” Patrick nods, bites his lip and turns on his heel, his sneakers kicking up miniature twisters that linger on storm-still air and blazing heat as he takes off towards somewhere that isn’t Pete.

 “Patrick, come on, wait.” Patrick doesn’t come on or wait. Instead, he carries on walking, hands in his pockets and his shoulders hunched. “Come back!”

He receives nothing but a pale middle finger in response. Pete pinches the sweaty bridge of his nose and wishes with all he has, all he is, that his foolish mouth came equipped with a do-over button. He kicks the spare tire hard enough that his foot aches.

Andy’s still in his tree. “You fucked that up.”

“It’s kind of hard to take you seriously when you’re scaling a tree. You look like a grade schooler on steroids.”

Proving that there’s no loyalty in the longevity of friendship, Joe joins in, “You went too far, dude. Look, I know the two of you never actually, you know, _resolved_ that whole—”

“If you say another word,” Pete interjects pleasantly, “I’ll kill the both of you — and anyone else who wants to play witness — and bury you all in the nearest wooded area. You have no idea how many times I googled how to do that shit and get away with it over the past ten years.”

“Has anyone told you you’re kind of aggressive?” Joe asks. “Like a really pissed off chihuahua. I can’t figure out if you want to bite me or just hump the shit out of my leg to demonstrate dominance. Like, do you need Dr Phil or Cesar Millan? Who the fuck knows.”

Along the highway, Patrick is making progress remarkably fast, receding to a mirage-haze shadow against the curving ribbon of asphalt. Now Pete’s thinking about it, it’s kind of strange that there’s been no traffic in or out of the town. He looks back at Joe. “Try me, motherfucker.”

“Have you considered the concept of an apology?” Andy is perilously high, shouting down from the uppermost branches as he stretches out his phone like Icarus reaching for the sun. “Just an idea.”

“Have you considered the concept of kissing my ass?” Pete flicks his gaze back towards Patrick. He’s maybe a mile along the highway, halfway to town and gaining impossible speed although his strides and short and unhurried. Pete blinks. “Guys, how did he…”

“We need to call someone at Crush,” says Joe, scowling down at his phone. “Or, you know, we would if we had any service. I hope he finds a phone.”

Pete pulls up short. “Maybe we could—” He looks back to the highway. Stares. Blinks. Shields his eyes with cupped hands and hisses, “—what the fuck?”

Patrick is gone.

Not lost to a hidden swell and dip in the road, not drifting into the tree line for a piss. He was there and now he’s not. Patrick has disappeared into the proverbial thin air. Pete doesn’t believe in magic or fairy tales or cosmic bullshit but he does believe in international kidnapping rings. However, even through the prickling haze of blooming panic, he has to admit he’s never heard of one that can operate without a means of motorized transportation.

There will, must, be a rational explanation. He screws his eyes closed until the lids ache and tries to remember if he’s in Kansas or if that was Patrick. He brings his heels together three times anyway, replaces ruby red slippers with limited edition Nikes and whispers his wish onto the Midwest wind.

He opens his eyes. Patrick is nowhere to be seen.

“Uh,” he begins softly, “Guys? Where the fuck is Patrick?” Joe and Andy share a look; they’ve been doing that a lot since Folie. Pete’s getting entirely pissed off with it if he’s honest. It used to be the look that said ‘has Pete taken his meds?’ or ‘is Pete hammered again?’ But Pete is neither drunk nor under or over-medicated as he points at the highway, empty, and says again, panicked this time. “Patrick? Where the fuck did he go?”

“Who the fuck,” says Andy, baffled, “is Patrick?”

If this is a joke, Pete’s not laughing. He flexes his fists and strains on his tiptoes, craning his neck like the road isn’t flat and the course isn’t obvious. “You’re not funny,” he says as Joe and Andy exchange another concerned glance, “seriously, you’re not. Where the fuck is he?”

“Good to go,” the bus driver slides down the engine observation door on a bus that was blue but is now red, “shall we get back on the road?”

What was he doing to the engine? Wasn’t it a tire blow out?

“We can’t leave without Patrick.” Pete is off-balance, like he’s peering into the furthest, unmapped recesses of the universe and his head is singing with stardust. He did _see_ Patrick leave, didn’t he? Was he wearing a blue shirt or a black one? He eyes the road doubtfully; it’s been a long time since Pete experienced a psychotic episode. “Guys,” they’re heading back to the bus already, “guys, _seriously_ , we can’t — we can’t leave without _Patrick_.”

“Uh, dude.” Joe is advancing on him, hands spread with the palms pushed forward like Pete is the crazy one for _not_ wanting to drive off over the golden horizon and leave their lead singer stranded in the middle of nowhere. Even if that singer is a pissy little asshole who absolutely deserves it. “Who the fuck is Patrick?”

Pete is emotionally and intellectually ill-equipped to deal with explaining a decade of a band to someone who was _there_. He turns to Andy and raises his eyebrows, his explanation dealt in four syllables: “You know, _Patrick_? Guys, fucking _seriously_ , this isn’t funny! Did he put you up to this?”

“Uh?” says Andy eloquently, his mouth hanging open just a little. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Singer?” Pete offers, gesturing in the vague vicinity of his own eyebrows. “About so high? Blond? Perpetually pissed off? Last seen heading west like, _two fucking minutes ago_?”

They share that look again. Joe says, “Maybe I should call Matt.”

“ _Matt_? Who the hell is _Matt_?” This isn’t amusing. “Wait, _Mixon_? Why the fuck would you call _him_?”

“Calling our manager is what we generally do when you get…” Joe waves a hand expansively at Pete; it is not a complimentary gesture, “like this.”

“We are in a band,” Pete says, very clearly and very loudly, in case, perhaps, Joe and Andy have simultaneously gone deaf; they nod slowly in response.

“Yes,” Andy agrees, “we are.”

“Fall Out Boy,” Joe clarifies, as if Pete didn’t know already, “are you okay?”

Pete holds up a hand for silence. “That band has a singer.”

“Yeah,” says Joe, “Me?”

Andy points at Joe helpfully, “Him.”

Pete stopped having time for this the split-second Patrick was, apparently, sucked from the space-time continuum. He spares a glance at the town, shimmering like a mirage in the snake coil curve of the highway and — without further consideration or explanation — he takes off running. He has no idea where he’s running _too_ , nothing beyond the vague notion of heading in the same direction as Patrick, a bone-deep compulsion to close the distance between them driving each stride. Behind him, Joe and Andy’s voices stutter and fade, crackling like static phone lines in basement venues.

He makes the curve in the road in a fraction of the time it should take him. Pete’s been hitting the gym since the band got back together, that much is true, but he’s still wearing skinny jeans and unlaced sneakers and it’s still ninety degrees in the shade and eighty-percent humidity. He should be panting like a dog, braced over his own knees and throwing up into the dirt like it’s 2002 and he’s tossing up liquor in ill-advised quantities. Instead, the ground swallows up his strides, hurling him onwards, a whispering rush in his ears as he skids on dust and badly maintained asphalt.

He feels it as he hits the same spot that swallowed up Patrick. The air around him pushes back, the tensile resistance of it like a membrane that forces him back. He pauses, considers the horizon-shimmer of it and tests it with his fingertips. This is some seriously fucked-up shit.

“Pete!” Joe shouts, his voice far closer than it ought to be. “Come on, dude, we have to go!”

For an instant, Pete imagines that he does. That he accepts this universe and heads back to the bus and lives in the world he just wished for. The one in which he and Patrick never met. The problem is this: there is no Pete without Patrick. Pete _exists_ because of Patrick, of that much he’s unshakably certain. So, if the two must coexist, it makes immediate and rational sense that Pete must bring him back. This decided, he drops his shoulder and shoves. This time, the barrier doesn’t resist, he hurtles through easily and onto the other side with enough force to send him sprawling to his hands and knees.

Whatever it is, it spits him out at the edge of a town that should still be a couple of miles in front of him. Against the worn-out, one-way route into the township limits, a wooden sign sags against rusting chains.

_Welcome to Nowhere._

Nowhere is entirely, completely deserted.

The town is small, probably no more than a couple of thousand people even before they abandoned it. It’s got that picturesque, middle America main street with a rusting flagpole over the post office and a movie theater advertising PET R  P N. Cars sag against the curbstones, station wagons and pickup trucks in varying shades of orange-red rust abandoned outside of the drugstore and diner, like the people of Nowhere just upped and vanished and the world was too indifferent to look for them. Pete has heard of towns like this; old mining communities uprooted when the work dried up or that creepy as all get out place he wanted to visit out in Pennsylvania that’s been on fire since the sixties.

It’s not a huge surprise when he looks back the way he came and sees nothing but empty road. No bus, no band, nothing but unoccupied highway and the gnarled boughs of the sycamore Andy was swinging from. It’s like Pete has slipped through to the wrong side of a one-way mirror. No, it’s not _surprising_ they’re not there, but it’s still _terrifying_. If he weren’t running off adrenaline and poor life choices right now, there’s every possibility he’d throw up.

Theoretically, there may be at least a couple of people in this town. Pete has a loosely formed plan about locating them and demanding to know what awful pact they made with which particular demon to bring about this soulless hell vortex in the center of this specific corner of otherwise ordinary Midwest.

He pauses and stares at the floor warily. There’s another of those lines, same as the one that separated the two of them out on the highway. Pete does not trust this line and demonstrates it by inching his toe warily towards it. He thinks something might happen, it might shimmer or stretch or, like, bite his fucking foot off with demonic, ten-foot teeth. It does not react. It remains, disappointingly, as a line on the floor. Pete kicks a pebble over. The pebble remains a pebble. Pete looks back at the empty highway and then takes a deep breath and moves forward.

The first step over the dirt line and nothing happens, no fire and brimstone, no circles of hell ascending to haul him down to where he belongs. Just more asphalt under his sneakers and the welcome sign creaking on its chain.

Still, it’s probably best to proceed with caution.

He’s been in towns like this before, knows the way they spiderweb out from the main street in regimented blocks. Hell, tip it halfway on its axis and look at it from the right angle and it could almost be Wilmette or Glenview. But he can’t shake the feeling that something is watching him, a burning itch between his shoulder blades as he presses on through the streets. If he closes his eyes and stands perfectly still, he swears he can hear someone — many someones — whispering from the empty windows.

It is, in some ways at least, a little like being on stage. That endless sensation of eyes somewhere beyond the glare of the lights. In other ways, it’s more like appearing on I Don’t Want Your Life dot com, pouting for his Sidekick with his dick in his hand, subject to endless anonymous ridicule. Sometimes, Pete relates to every princess in the castle fairy tale on an almost spiritual level.

None of this helps him locate his missing singer. There’s precious little to go off and, without a better plan in place, he gives it the old ‘inky binky bonky’ and takes off along the road his finger lands on; a quiet, suburban street heading out from the main thoroughfare.

He doesn’t so much find what he’s looking for as walk straight into it. So occupied is Pete by craning his neck to look back over his shoulder, that he misses the street sign entirely until he greets it with his face. He earns throbbing pain and that sweaty, swollen feeling of imminent purple bruising for his trouble but he’s close to ninety-percent certain that the pole in question wasn’t there ten seconds previously. He squints up at it, squirming a little with embarrassment that whatever-the-fuck is following him might have seen him walk straight into a wooden post. Then his heart stops.

Bellwood Lane.

Patrick grew up on Bellwood — the western side that heads out to the municipal pool — a neat little pocket of suburbia where even the small lots are larger than average, a John Hughes haven of well-painted siding and star-spangled banners hung all year round. Not quite Wilmette but close.

It’s just a street name, Pete reminds himself as his lungs contract and his vision blurs. If he googled it, he guesses there’s several hundred Bellwood Lanes peppered around the United States, nothing more than coincidence and unimaginative city planning.

But still, he hesitates. It’s — well, it’s _weird_ , isn’t it? He glances around, up and down the dirt-road nothingness of this unremarkable ghost town. There’s nothing there, _no one_ there, just empty road and endless, unseeing eyes in the form of undressed windows. He shakes his head and reminds himself, firmly, that this is _not_ Glenview.

Then, he squares his shoulders, touches his throbbing, swollen eye and walks down Bellwood Lane anyway.

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading last week and, of course, a thousand thank yous to those of you who left feedback! 
> 
> Last week we left Pete stranded in Nowhere, confronted with the possibility that he might have stumbled across something that could lead him to Patrick. What will he find down Bellwood Lane...
> 
> [](https://www.flickr.com/photos/168268289@N03/33019601988/in/dateposted-public/)

The houses are normal. Differing shades of green, gray, brown plucked from the same catalog of unremarkable suburban familiarity. They’re old, though. Rundown and dirty, peeling paint and missing roof tiles, driveways cracked and broken like ancient, decaying teeth.

The social rot, the unkind twist of time, means Pete sees it immediately.

The powder blue house with shutters so white they glow blinding against the siding, the neat gray station wagon parked in front of the garage, a basketball hoop that hasn’t been used in years, a familiar bike slung on the asphalt. The window on the first floor is exactly Pete’s arm’s length from the trellis that supports a rambling rose bush studded with early pink buds. Pete shredded that rose from the wall the first time he fell, ass first, trying to scale his way up the framework and into — into —

He checks the mailbox and is unsurprised to find _3416_ in blood red paint, the flag propped up. There’s a sick, dread-cold feeling in the pit of Pete’s stomach, a twisted knot of panic that spiders out through his guts as he stares at this most familiar house on an entirely unfamiliar street. Whatever this is, they even added the house number to the curb out front, it makes Pete’s head swim with vertigo even though he’s on solid ground.

The porch boards creak under his sneakers. Pete is half a beat off in every movement, that sticky-slow feeling of being close to buzzed, alcohol fuzzing through his synapses even though the strongest thing he’s had to drink all morning is rest stop coffee. He touches the door and feels his wrist rattle with rubberized bangles in a dozen different colors. God but it’s been _years_ since he wore these, trading them out in line with the high school code, each color an alleged sexual act, a Claire’s rainbow of debauched misdemeanors. It’s almost unsurprising that his arm is leaner, cleaner, his sleeve nothing more than bold, bare linework between the bangles and the sleeve of his Fugazi shirt.

The window panes reflect a different Pete; hair cropped short to hide the curl, too much eyeliner and not enough sleep pooling shadows under his eyes. He’s wearing a nose ring, a nipple ring and, he suspects, rings in a few other places that aren’t immediately apparent. Arriving on the stoop of a house he hasn’t visited in years, wearing the skin of a Pete he hasn’t been in over a decade is, remarkably, not the weirdest thing to happen to him today so he knocks, waits and knows who’s going to answer.

He knocks again when no one comes. “Alright! Just give me a fucking second, would you?”

Patrick is at once the most comforting and terrifying thing that Pete has seen since he stumbled over the town limits. This is Patrick, but not _his_ Patrick. The baby-faced teen with a mouth that’s a felony waiting to happen. He’s wearing an argyle sweater, black socks and shorts and Pete still wants to laugh.

“Hey,” says Pete, because that’s what he said in 2001 and he’s not sure what else to say. “I’m — Pete.”

Pete knows this conversation, knows the way Patrick will stammer and blush but hide it with wanton assholery. Apparently, they’re going off script because  instead, Not-Patrick touches the smooth, young line of his jaw, slides and rubs the pad of his thumb against the lower lip Pete bit ( _Will_ bite? Is this time travel or some other kind of mystic tomfoolery?) raw twelve months later against the side of Joe’s van and gestures inside.

“You found it, then,” he says. “I thought you would, but I can never be sure.”

Pete is almost certain Patrick isn’t talking about the house, but he asks anyway. “Your house? Yeah man, I — I’ve been here before.”

“Come in,” says Not-Patrick and, without waiting, he turns on his heel and heads into the house, “I have something to show you.” Pete hesitates and glances left and right, watching Glenview bleed out along the street from Patrick’s lot like an inkstain. Desolation gives way to lawns and nineties cars and kids sporting Glenbrook High sweaters. It’s fascinating, frightening, Pete’s lungs stammering around the accelerated stutter of his pulse. Patrick’s voice echoes down the hallway, eerie. “Come on, man! You’re gonna _love_ this!”

On the threshold, Pete touches his bare left wrist, smudging his thumb along the plump, blue vein he hasn’t seen without ink in over a decade. He needs to find Patrick and, odds are, Not-Patrick will have some idea about how to make that happen. He steps inside and back through a looking glass into 2001.

The house is empty aside from them but Pete can still hear that hum of whispers from the walls. They’re louder in here, buzzing sharply enough to make his eardrums ring but he still can’t pick out anything definitive. He skips the creaking floorboard by the kitchen door, steps over the skull-splitting trip hazard of the hallway rug and ignores the smell of veggie lasagna hanging thick and comforting over this: the only house Pete has ever felt at home.

He finds Patrick in the basement, the uncovered bulb pushing horrifying shadows along the walls around him. When Pete takes the final step he looks up, he pats the worn cushions of Chicago’s ugliest couch (certified — Pete has seen a _lot_ of Chicagoan couches in his time) and smiles, inviting and toothsome and painfully teenage.

“Hey! Come sit with me, look at this, it’s _so cool_ , I swear.”

On Patrick’s knees, spilling across the couch and down onto the floor at his feet, are polaroids. So many polaroids. They crowd, inches thick on the threadbare rug and pooling over his worn out converse. Something about them makes Pete feel nauseous, they send uneasy heat spooling thick in his stomach and paint bitter bile at the back of his tongue.

“Come on, man,” Patrick holds out a handful in invitation, “you’re gonna like, piss your pants at how funny they are, swear to God.”

There’s an uneasiness to him, a vicious edge to his voice that makes Pete flinch. Against the carpet, his feet shuffle forward; one converse and then the other leading the way across orange polyester marbled with yellow and brown until he’s looming over him.

This close, he can see the peach fuzz softness of Not-Patrick’s honey gold facial hair, the way it gathers, close to white, like baby hair, at the corners of his top lip. He’s cut himself shaving, the edges of it dark with dried blood and it punches something somewhere between Pete’s stomach and his heart.

Not-Patrick is still smiling, his sensible haircut and neat, mom-approved glasses exactly how Pete remembers them. He’s adorable in a way Pete always thought girls should be into but Patrick insisted they weren’t, that thick, pink bottom lip pillowed prettily as he smiles and holds out a picture.

“Do you remember this?”

The couch is exactly as uncomfortable as it looks, Pete remembers this as he flops down onto it. His spine twists, screaming memories of nights spent trying to find a way to lie on it that didn’t attempt to realign his vertebrae like it had a personal grudge against him. Those were the nights he’d work the basement window open from the outside, tumbling to the floor and laying there until Patrick found him. The nights he was brave, the nights he didn’t hide, he spent those on Patrick’s bed in a tangle of too many limbs and unlaced converse and sour morning breath. He takes the polaroid from Patrick’s hand.

Patrick stares up at him from the picture, challenging. The shitty haircut is much the same shape but four inches longer, dirty blond hair falling into his eyes. Patrick is young, drunk on first real friendships and illegitimately obtained alcohol. Beside him, Pete spoons cereal into his mouth, briefly straightedge and thoroughly deadpan. “Shit! Is this—”

“Chris’s party? I know, right?” Patrick leans into him, solid and warm, it’s almost possible to imagine this is real, that these are Pete’s skinny, twenty-one-year-old knees, his twisted bracelets, his _Patrick_ and not a mirage of a memory from over a decade ago. “You got me _so_ drunk that night, it was awesome. How about this?”

This one is breathtaking, the beanie Pete crammed onto Patrick’s head yanked low over his eyes, his mouth pink and wet and wide open. He’s sweating through his hat, through his shirt. He’s so young, so beautiful, so impossibly bright with promise and talent that Pete sucks in a breath.

“I have a copy of this,” he admits softly, turning it over in his hands, deciding each new way he looks at it is his favorite angle, “in my room at my mom’s place. I — I used to look at it a lot.”

“Oh my _God,_ did you like, jerk off over it?”

Pete squints down at the polaroid in his hand; his ears feel pink. “I mean, it’s a pretty good picture…”

“You did!” he crows, eyes glittering like seaglass, “You totally fucking jacked it to my picture! Do I need to call Child Protective Services?”

“Oh my God yourself, dipshit, you’re like, _eighteen_ in this one!”

They sift through the pictures companionably, quietly contemplative and holding up particularly good — or spectacularly _bad_ ones — for closer inspection. They laugh at their awful outfits, terrible haircuts, they talk about parties Pete had forgotten and shows he swears he’ll never forget. They debate ordering pizza from that place out towards Golf. The light outside shifts and changes from the gold bright of spring afternoon to the silvered threat of dusk. Pete blinks, shifts a stack of polaroids from his lap and looks up.

There’s something he needs to remember. Some _one_. “Hey, I should probably—” Go? Where?

“Nah, stay over,” Patrick shrugs and doesn’t look up. The floor is a masterpiece of mismatched photography, pictures of every conceivable size and shade. They flood the basement, the stairs, the couch, stacked three inches high around their feet. “Mom won’t mind. She likes you for some like, totally inexplicable reason.”

Pete blinks slowly. “I have — I need to be somewhere.”

It doesn’t make sense; he has nowhere else to be. No show tonight, his mom isn’t expecting him home for dinner any more or less than she usually is. Patrick is cute, sweet and eager to impress. Pete has no idea why he’s prickled with unease.

Patrick smiles. His teeth are very sharp. “Come on, man. What’re you afraid of? Stay with me.”

Pete reaches for another picture. This one is different, Patrick crammed into the tiny shower cubicle of their rundown apartment. He’s dressed up like a kid in his dad’s shoes — Pete’s beanie, jeans, Dive In shirt — his smile wide but pinched and wild as the water floods down over him. The shirt is white, washed sheer and showing the darkened spots of his nipples through the cotton, highlighting the desperate glow that crests his cheekbones. Pete remembers the video camera but not an actual camera, this shot taken from the spot by the bathroom door where Pete was standing at the time. His throat feels dry, tight, as he shifts against the couch.

“I don’t remember taking this,” he says carefully. The edge of it slices through the pad of his thumb, Patrick’s blush stained deeper by thick, dark blood. “Shit!”

“Always trying to impress you,” Patrick replies, reaching down like it’s random and pulling up another picture, “always trying to make you proud.”

This one shows Patrick, wide-eyed and humiliated. Even through the paper, under the beanie, across twelve _years_ of space and time to recover, Pete can feel his blush. It’s not a nice blush, not the kind that colored him pink from first time kisses but the kind that drenched him in blood-bright heat from stomach sore embarrassment.

“You talked me into going to a party that night, remember?” Pete does, but he’d really rather he didn’t. “You talked me into going along with all your college friends and then you ditched me the second someone cooler showed up. I cried the whole walk home.” Pete remembers looking for him in the morning, sobered up and ashamed. But Patrick didn’t see that. “How about this one,” he tosses another picture, _that_ shot from Bedussey, “you remember _that_? How you set me up so the world would call me fat?”

“I — I never,” Pete stammers; Patrick has this all wrong. Pete would never, _could_ never, the notion of it is as foreign to him as breathing water, as walking through flames. “I didn’t mean…”

The bracelets at his wrist begin to itch, to tighten, biting like thorns into the butter soft youthfulness of his skin. He slides his thumb under them, holds them back from the frantic throb of his pulse and stares intently at Patrick’s profile. His soft, red mouth works silently, forming words that whistle through the walls, that grinding, background whisper flooding back. It batters his ear drums, worse than post-show static, terrible, terrifying sound that twists him with dread and makes him want to clamp his hands over his ears.

“You talked me into things again and again,” Patrick snarls, tossing picture after picture into Pete’s lap, each one a painful reminder of Patrick doing something dumb to make Pete laugh, because Pete told him it would be funny. “You made me think I was funny, I was smart, I was _special_ , but all you wanted was the laugh track, wasn’t it? That’s all you ever wanted.”

“No! I didn’t — I never meant to—”

“Yes, you did!” Pete is drowning in pictures, the weight of them climbing up over his thighs, his stomach and chest, crushing his lungs until he’s asphyxiating on paranoia and misunderstanding, they slither, insidious, across his throat, pressing into his windpipe, threatening to cover his nose, mouth, eyes, “you didn’t give a shit about him, all you wanted was to make yourself look good, that was all that mattered to you. Admit it! Say it out loud and all of this will stop, just fucking _admit it!_ ”

_Him_? Pete’s lungs flutter, his heels scrabbling against the floor as he struggles to gain his feet, to get upstairs, to get out because he’s looking — he’s looking for — for —

“Patrick!” he blurts. The word makes his chest ache sore, his ribs too tight and his heart too large. Once he says it out loud, once it stains his tongue like a curse, a blood oath, then it stings through his skin until he says it again. “Patrick, Patrick, Patrick! I need to find Patrick!”

On the couch, the thing wearing Patrick’s skin smiles.

“ _I’m_ Patrick,” it says coldly from lips it doesn’t really own. “You’re looking for _me_ , you can stay with _me_. We’re having a good time, right?”

“No, I need to go,” he repeats what what he knows, what he’s _sure_ of, “I — the bus. It broke down. We fought. Andy, Joe, Patrick,” Pete slams the heel of his hand into his temple with each name uttered, like he can drive the reality of them back into his skull with brute force, “we had a fight, I need to say sorry. Where’s Patrick?”

“He’s right here, asshole,” the thing says. “You’re looking at him.”

Not ‘me’, but ‘him’. Pete is many things including, but not limited to, self-centered, vacuous, unobservant and selfish, but he’s not stupid and he knows his pronouns. “Who are you?”

And it touches him, for the first time, in the center of his chest.

The agony is acute and immediate. Like connecting a live wire to the base of his skull, like reaching for the third rail, Pete’s blood and lymph are replaced with razor wire that tears him apart via his vascular system. He falls to his knees, hands slammed to his temples and the thing breaks its hold. Dazed, he blinks up and watches that thick, pink mouth curve into a grin.

“You’re not _my_ Patrick.” _That’s it_ ; Pete rounded a corner and broke through a wall looking for Patrick. _His_ Patrick, not this twisted, Coraline, Other-Patrick changeling wrapped in a glamour of the face, voice and fury of his best friend. It blinks at him from eyes that aren’t quite the right color, the pupil expanding as  it shows its teeth. This time, it isn’t a smile. “What the fuck _are_ you.”

The creature laughs in Patrick’s voice and a shiver crawls the length of Pete’s spine. Whatever this thing is, wherever it’s brought him, Pete knows now that it does not wish him well. Around them, the illusion is crumbling, the house peeling and blackening and receding, mould and ash and decay creeping through the walls, the floor, the dank, dark depths of the couch. Terrified, Pete scrambles away from the cushions, some dim and distant part running beyond animal instinct noting his full sleeve, his ripped designer jeans. Pete is whole once more but in the maelstrom of fear, that fact offers little comfort.

“You know who I am.”

Pete shakes his head weakly, his knees wet noodles and his tongue trapped in cotton. “No.”

“ _I’m Patrick_ ,” it says, and its voice is broken bones, gravel under bare feet and gut-cramping fear ringing through Pete’s skull like a root canal, “I’m the parts of Patrick that _you_ created. I’m the fear, the loneliness, the insecurity, the vacillation.”

“I wouldn’t do that to him,” he says, more confident than he feels.

It curls its lips and shows those sharp, unlovely teeth, “You don’t deserve him.”

This is undeniably true, but Pete isn’t sure that this thing, whatever it is, deserves Patrick either, that he should walk back to that unlovely universe where no one remembers his kid with the golden voice. A world without Patrick is one without sunrise, without starlight, without laughter or hope and it’s not a place Pete intends to reside. He pushes to his feet — unsteady, like he’s drunk — and faces the thing down.

The whispering crescendos around them, crushing and terrible. Pete can pull out syllables, sharp-edged consonants and barbed wire vowels, but nothing tangible, nothing _real._ The photographs twist their way around his ankles like shackles, sharp and rusted as they bite through his jeans and into his skin, crawling higher, past his knees, up his thighs.

“I raised him up,” he says, _shouts_ , his throat pulled raw although it’s barely a whisper over the throb of half-heard voices screaming just beyond the walls, “look back through those memories and find the good ones. The time I talked him out on stage at our first show; the time I walked him home when he convinced _himself_ that everyone at a party hated him; the time I stood in front of him while kids threw bottles of piss at the stage and took every hit so he wouldn’t have to.”

The thing falters. The room around them is nothing more than a rotten shell of a building, squalor left to sink back into the landscape, unloved and unlovely. Beyond the lot, Glenview is gone and there’s nothing left behind but decaying houses and abandoned lives. The thing blinks slowly, its eyes shifting from riptide to the color of burst lips that taste of copper and salt; thick and red and violent. Pete advances slowly, each step forward pushing the creature back against the wall.

It says, “You don’t—”

“No! _You don’t_ get to tell me I used him,” he hisses, venomous, “you don’t get to say that none of it was real, that he was the punchline to every bad joke. I told him time and again, I told our friends, I told our fans, I told every two-bit journalist who brought a microphone near my mouth that Patrick goddamn Stump was too good for my shit. Do your pictures show you that?” The glamour slips for a moment and Pete sees something ugly behind the mask, just a flash, the sensation of catching sight of a face through a fogged mirror. The thing looks furious. “I bought every copy of Soul Punk I found, I ordered them from Amazon like it was a fucking compulsion. I bought tickets to shows I never went to, I praised every golden note that fell from his throat and you think I _ridiculed_ him? I didn’t need to make him shine, he was already golden when I found him. I just… showed the world how golden he was next to someone as rotten as me.”

“You don’t deserve him,” the thing repeats, but it’s weaker, the whispers in the walls hissing back to a hushed background murmur.

The pictures loosen their grip, faltering with their master and Pete seizes his opportunity with both hands. “You don’t either.”

He’s too far from the steps to make it back upstairs but there’s late evening sunlight shafting golden onto the floor. The window. Pete hurls himself at it, throws his fist at the glass and feels it bounce, bend, resist, just like the bubble outside of the town. He hits it again and again, feels his knuckles crack and bleed, bruises springing up thick and purple as the pain finds pace with his pulse. The glass breaks, shatters to nothing and Pete smiles, victorious, over his shoulder before scrambling out into the raw, arid air.

“You can’t win this, Pete Wentz!” The screams ricochet from behind him like bullets. “You’re not worthy!”

“No,” he agrees, “but I will be.”

It goes like this: Pete tumbles through broken glass and the final, dying scream of the thing behind him, rolling onto his back with his fist and his heart fighting for which can overwhelm him with the most exquisite agony. Eyes pinched closed, he rolls onto his back and feels the sticky summer heat of pre-storm static prickle his skin. He breathes, reminds his heart that it doesn’t need to attempt to beat its way through his ribs.

He flops a hand to the side and expects to feel the crunch of dead grass under his skin. Instead he feels broken asphalt, the glitter-bright grate of pebbles against his palm. He smells dust instead of dirt. Confused, he opens his eyes and struggles to sit, blinking, blinded in the sudden burst of light. Despite spending hours down in that basement, the sun is mid-morning high and Pete is not in one of the abandoned lots on Not-Bellwood Lane.

He’s back on Main Street. He’s not bleeding at all.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, that cleared things up wonderfully, didn't it?
> 
> Comments, kudos and theories are all welcomed! You can also come and say hi on tumblr [here!](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/sn1tchesandtalkers)


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, you can probably guess from the tags which era of Patrick we're going to meet this time. It can't possibly go as badly as it did with van days Patrick, right?
> 
> ... Right?
> 
> [](https://www.flickr.com/photos/168268289@N03/46919709282/in/dateposted-public/)

Pete climbs back to his feet.

Not because he has a grand plan, a master stroke of untapped genius about how to proceed in this town named Nowhere. No, he does it because he has  _ no idea _ about what to do next. Because, for the past twelve years, Pete has been knocked to his ass and risen to his feet so many times that it’s muscle memory, hardwired into bone and sinew. So, he stands. Because he doesn’t know how to do anything else. He shivers on Main Street although the sun is warm and the air desert dry and waits for some grand, divine sign. 

What happens is this: 

Nothing.

The buildings stare back at him, their whispering silenced; the breeze ruffles along the avenue and stirs up the fine hairs at the back of his neck; the welcome sign creaks on its rusted chain and nothing — at all — happens.

He screams, at no one in particular, “Come on, asshole! What the fuck are you waiting for?”

The buildings don’t reply. It would seem that Pete is going to have to figure this out alone.

“Inky, binky, bonky,” says Pete, pointing at each street in turn because it worked last time, his internal processing skills are somewhat hampered and, honestly, he’s still roughly seven years old emotionally, “daddy had a donkey, donkey died, daddy cried, inky… binky… bonky.”

He takes off down an avenue of empty lots, overgrown and creeping with thick, heavy vegetation. The path between is narrow, nothing more than compacted dirt slicing through the tangle of boughs and grass and sharp stinging nettles. Pete skirts through sideways, dodging the worst of it and only taking a few swiping stings to his exposed arms and face. He used to wear hoodies in midsummer, Patrick used to laugh at him, wet with sweat in LA heat and wrapped in striped fleece. Right now, he’d give his right nut to be wearing  _ anything _ but a muscle tank.

The path grows narrower, the light shifting from gold to green as the canopy closes over his head. Pete has been walking for hours and now he’s barely making progress at all. He sweats, thick, dark rings under the arms of his shirt, slicking the cotton to his back as he thrusts, shoves, pushes his way through the undergrowth. It’s funny, he hasn’t heard a single bird sing since he got here. Pete doesn’t claim to be an enthusiastic expert in ornithology — or indeed, anything at all aside from casual assholery — but the fact still leaves him unsettled.

Arms bare and torn bloody already, he slips off his belt and wraps it over his hand — an unsatisfying layer of not-quite-protection — and begins to claw his way through the growth. Blood and sweat sting through him, each hot, wet mouthful of air gulped greedily as he twists and turns and fights his way forward. Grim with determination, he grits his teeth against the exhaustion and throws himself into the foliage.

Above him, the sun begins to set.

Up ahead, Pete thinks he sees  _ something _ . A flash of unnatural color in endless, all-consuming green, gray, brown. Suddenly, Pete is a madman, tiredness forgotten as he scrapes his nails bloody in an effort to get closer, faster. Patrick, he reminds himself, he’s looking for Patrick, he can find  _ Patrick _ . He staggers, stumbles out through the branches and falls over his own feet, ungraceful and skittering. He can see Patrick, he’s sure of it, a flash of co-ordinated hoodie and hat just a few more steps and — 

He’s back on Main Street, staggering from the alleyway beside the bus station. It’s mid-morning. He isn’t bleeding.

“What the  _ fuck _ !” Pete implores of the buildings around him. The buildings, unsurprisingly, have very little to say. “Okay, wrong way. It’s fine. It’s absolutely  _ fine _ ,” Pete is aware that talking to oneself is an act of madness, but presumes things are fine as long as he doesn’t start hallucinating the answers, “Must’ve got turned around and… Alright. Let’s do this. Inky, binky, bonky…”

This path is different; industrial buildings and warehouses looming over him like sentinels and a path made of barely compacted gravel. In this lucid nightmare, this waking fever dream, hot and sticky with his own sweat, Pete is beginning to forget the sound of Patrick’s voice.

He runs until he can’t run any further, until his feet are bleeding and his lungs threaten to rupture. Then he walks, stumbles, staggers his way through this endless hell of gray concrete and red-rust corrugated steel. Then he sees someone rounding a corner up ahead, a flash of hunched shoulders and smooth paleness. He runs until he trips and falls, his knees and palms scraped raw against the asphalt. He looks up and — 

He’s back on Main Street, staggering from the alleyway beside the bus station. It’s mid-morning. He isn’t bleeding.

“Oh _come on_!” He hauls himself to his feet, unharmed physically, but drained entirely. “Okay, we’re playing it this way, huh? Inky, binky, _fucking_ _bonky_ …”

He finds himself in a community park, the swings rusted off the frame, the slide rotten through with urban decay. Pete runs until his lungs scream, until his arches ache for rest. He runs with his hands cupped around his mouth as he screams Patrick’s name over and over again. He rounds off loops pinned in by rusted chain link fencing, stumbling along bike trails and walkways, turning endlessly. He catches branches to the face, feels the whip of them along the delicate, exposed skin of his brow and his blood oozing thick and free. He runs until his chest burns, until the sun begins to sink behind the treeline. He sees a flash of something up ahead; brightly colored sneakers and a matching hoodie and — 

He’s back on Main Street, staggering from the alleyway beside the bus station. It’s mid-morning. He isn’t bleeding.

Wordlessly, Pete flops to his back and stares at the sky. He lets the dust stick to his skin and imagines it might be possible to sink down into the dirt. Buried in memory. There are tears on his face although he’s too exhausted to cry, he’s no more than a vessel of desperate, aching sadness. He raises a middle finger at the town around him. It’s less concerned by this than it has any right to be.

A door bangs closed. Pete is halfway to his elbows without making any attempt to move, the diner door swinging like an open invitation. This is the only movement — aside from the lazy back and forth of the town sign — that Pete has seen since he got here. He hauls himself to his feet once more and takes off, sprinting, across the dust and dirt. 

He slams through the double doors. For a second, he thinks the universe has become confused and overshot, the jukebox in the corner playing Little Richard and the waitress dressed in powder blue, the walls studded with Americana. This is the fifties, the sixties, the paradox folding in on itself in the wrong way and catching Pete in the inseam of this dreadful, horrible place.

Then he sees  _ her  _ and her neat little name badge above her left breast that reads ‘Lavinia’.  _ This time _ , he resists the urge to ask her what she calls the other one. He considers this a tremendous feat of personal growth.

He knows this diner.

“Welcome to Pick Me Up,” she says brightly, smiling like she’s in on a joke. “You’re looking for your friend, right?”

Pete can see the slope of Patrick’s shoulders on the far side of a booth, tucked away from the main body of the café. He nods uselessly and is unsurprised to find himself wrapped in an armor of Clandestine clothing; pale gray and peppered with purple bartskulls, his nails chipped with black polish. He swallows, the movement slow and foreign.

His sneakers slap against the black and white checkerboard tiling. They’re ugly; orange and gold hi tops that he saw in Japan and bought immediately just for the way Patrick’s lip curled with distaste. All of his sneakers back then (now?) were (are?) ugly. He slips into a vinyl coated seat on the far side of a chipped Formica table and raises his eyes slowly.

Patrick smiles at him, lopsided, shrugs shoulders that have grown thick and broad since his mid-teens and says, “I didn’t think you’d ever find me.”

“Maybe you should’ve stood still,” Pete says, “and then I might’ve had a chance.”

“There’s a metaphor for us lurking in there, don’t you think?” Patrick’s voice is light but his eyes are not; they’re dull, distant, clouded as lakewater. 

“I thought they closed this place down years ago,” Pete mutters as Lavinia slides a coffee onto the table at his elbow. He knows they  _ did  _ close down, he’s driven past the lot a few times in the past few years. At least, a version of Pete in another timeline has done it. He’s getting confused.

“They will,” Patrick shrugs, still smiling, “a few years from now, this’ll just be a memory we used to have.”

“We’re good at those.”

“You made it that way.”

There are no windows at this end of the diner. No one in the booths around them as Pete takes a sip of his coffee and tastes caramel syrup, and cheap, over-roasted grounds. Something bitter masked by something sweet; if Patrick wants a metaphor, Pete will find one for him. Patrick quirks his lips, and, compulsively, Pete reaches out and touches them. He likes the way they feel against his fingertips, the luscious, ripe fruit spring of that unholy lower lip against the callous-rough pad of his thumb. So he leans closer.

Pete, who has so little control over the shapes his lips can form, particularly in the face of Patrick Stump, blurts out, “God, you have the most beautiful mouth.” 

Patrick pulls back, his brow creased into a frown, his lips flat as he tips down the peak of his hat and scowls at the tabletop. Pete is, on every level, the very worst kind of person. He says, because apparently, he is very stupid and unable to stop saying incredibly stupid things, “I’m sorry. I — come sit with me.”

It’s clear that Patrick’s desire to sit anywhere but next to Pete is second only to the desire he clearly has to punch Pete in the mouth. His teeth grit as he pushes out words like they sting his tongue. “No thanks, I’m good here.”

Pete ploughs right on with the stupid.

“You know, I think there’s a bathroom out back, we could…” Pete doesn’t say the things they could do, but they’re automatically implicit in the way he smiles, all tooth and shine. Pete has so little to offer Patrick but his body and the opportunity for a convenient orgasm. Patrick lifts one shoulder in a shrug. “Come on, Rick. Don’t you want to?”

“How long should I leave it before I follow you?” Patrick asks quietly. There are holes in the cuffs of Pete’s hoodie, frayed around the edges like broken skin. He jams his thumbs into them. It feels like a comfort blanket, a suit of armor, somewhere he can hunker down and hide as he glances from side to side, notes the waitress talking to the short order cook. They can get away with this, no one has to know.

“Maybe two minutes,” Pete says, ducking down to catch Patrick’s eyes. “No one’ll see.”

It’s not that Pete necessarily  _ cares _ if they do. But people have a tendency to make assumptions about two dudes disappearing into a bathroom together and returning twenty minutes later, clothes in disarray. In this case, those assumptions are completely correct. The thing is, though, Pete is now able to measure the time since he last walked down the street without Gawker turning it into a traumatic and demonstrably untrue headline in annual calendars rather than days. He’s impervious to the harm that rumors and insinuations can do to him. He has been analyzed, deconstructed and pieced back together without his permission so many times that it no longer hurts to imagine the Franken-frontman scars. 

Pete Wentz: 2 days since your last relegation to national (sh)it boy. 

This is not a universe that he wants Patrick to inhabit with him. They co-exist, by dint of their music and status as — Pete’s sure of it — soulmates, insomuch as he is willing to accept he actually  _ has _ a soul. But, in a cosmic ballet of improbable interactions, Pete is more of a meteor. He’s, objectively, both beautiful and brilliant, blazing his trail across stages instead of night skies. He doesn’t want to strike Patrick’s planetary surface and take him out in an implosion of dust and heat. Still, no harm ever came from sharing interstellar warmth, so Pete reaches to touch Patrick’s knee under the table.

Patrick twists away, head down, and watches the way his pale fingers frame his white coffee cup, “How’s Ashlee?”

“You have such an elegant way with words.” There’s something about Patrick that sets Pete’s teeth on edge. He’s abrasive, bitter, poison clings to him and makes Pete brittle as broken bones. “Has anyone mentioned that your flirting is top-notch? Really, stella stuff, you should be proud.”

Instead of answering, Patrick retorts with a rapid fire barrage of questions of his own: “How’s Jeanae? How’s Morgan? How’s that girl from the show in Calgary? How’s that chick you met in a bar in Hollywood? How’s that waitress? That hotel concierge? Air hostess?  _ Hostesses _ , plural? The one from Hot Topic? The one—”

“Whoa!” Pete holds up both hands and sees a wedding ring carving into the third finger of his left hand. As if the ring is made of lead, his hand of air and both are only just learning the cause and effect of gravity, his hand thumps to the table. He regrets this immediately as the table is unpleasantly sticky and, instead, yanks his hands into his lap. “I — where the fuck did this come from?”

“The ring? Or my newfound immunity to your bullshit?” Patrick asks around a bitter little laugh. “The ring arrived right around the time you knocked her up and made me stand next to you while you promised to forsake all others. The immunity followed pretty swiftly after that when you tried to talk me into sucking your dick at your wedding reception.”

Pete bristles. “I though we agreed that you don’t fall into the category of the  _ others _ that I’m contractually obliged to forsake.”

“Different or distinct from the ones already mentioned,” Patrick snaps; Pete has never been quite so furious to be quoted the dictionary, “and unless I’m very much mistaken — which I’m  _ not _ , because I was, you know,  _ there _ —  _ my _ name wasn’t mentioned between ‘do you, Peter’ and ‘I do’.”

“That’s unfair,  _ you _ have a girlfriend, you’ve  _ had _ girlfriends—”

“Yeah, because I got so sick and fucking tired of coming home to an empty apartment, waiting for you to issue royal fucking summons to the Crown Court of Emo when you were done dicking every woman in a tri-state area.”

Self-conscious, Pete tugs at his bangs and drags them down over his eyes. Unlike Patrick, he has no hat to hide behind. “That’s not true.” It is; it’s entirely true. Pete wears self-loathing easier than he wears tight jeans, but not as easy as he wears pretty girls on his arm on tashy magazine covers. “Look, you know I love you. Why are you making this so much harder than it has to be?”

Character assassination apparently complete, Patrick slumps back against the pintucked vinyl and gestures grandly around the diner. “Maybe this place just fills me with nostalgia. New regrets. Something like that.”

That bites at a tender place in Pete’s heart, though he can’t really remember why. He touches his temple and feels it throb, his pulse crawling between skin and bone, his blood ticking to the beat of his anxiety like a metronome. 

“Why do you always have to turn me into the bad guy?” What Pete really means is this: why does the world at large have to turn him into the bad guy? The record label’s darling, the media’s whore. He’s great until he’s not, he’s perfect until the rust shows through the gold, he’s the reason the autocorrect at every laptop in every gossip rag predicts ‘caught’ after ‘Pete Wentz’. 

“It’s funny how a guy turns out when he spends his youth chasing after an impossible dream.”

“I gave you the world,” Pete snaps, and he  _ did _ . He  _ did _ hand this maddening, improbable, volatile creation of melody and foul temper everything he could summon, every accolade and award, every golden sunlight touch of stage lights to salt-sweat skin, “what more do you want from me?”

Something shimmers around them. The world lurches on its axis and the populace of the diner keep right on eating their hash browns and eggs over easy. 

And Patrick? He sneers, his lip curled and teeth hidden. “ _ You _ . For some inexplicable reason, I wanted  _ you _ .”

Pete wants that too, “I want that, too,” he says, to demonstrate and to gloss over the way Patrick is speaking in past tense, “I already told you, after Folie we can take some time and—”

“After Cork Tree, after the VMas, after the Grammys, after Infinity, spare me your posturing bullshit,” Patrick swigs viciously at his coffee, clearly wishing it were whisky. His eyes flicker, amber under the blue and Pete frowns. “You were ashamed of me, that’s what it comes down to.”

“Were?” Pete prompts carefully. There’s something strange beyond the window at the far side of the diner; Chicago is not known for palm trees. This is a conversation Pete feels they’ve had all over the world, in a hundred different diners, cafes and hidden hotel rooms. Hollywood Boulevard seems to crawl with neon, something of Tokyo creeping through the SoCal haze. “What do you mean  _ were _ ?”

“Does that mean you still are?”

“No,” Pete says, slurring like he’s drunk, “it means — why are you — your tenses are all screwed up…”

Blood is roaring in Pete’s ears, pounding against his eardrums as he waits for a response. This means, for a moment or two, he dismisses the hum of whispered voices crescendoing around them as nothing more than a side-effect of an ongoing aneurysm induced by another patented Patrick Stump Breakup Speech. But they’re insistent, varied and terrifyingly loud for medical side effects. Pete clamps his hands over his ears and tells himself he’s not going crazy. 

“You made me a vessel for your thoughts,” Patrick says, his voice no louder but Pete can still hear it over the deafening onslaught of hissing accusations, “You made me sing the songs you wrote for them and I couldn’t figure it out, you know? Why I hated Ashlee more than I should, why I forgave Jeanae less than I could’ve. It’s because — because you used me. You made me think I had to be what you wanted and what you wanted was for me to hide. I don’t know how to  _ feel _ anymore, and you  _ stole _ that from me.”

_ Phoney, _ the walls hiss,  _ narcissist, egomaniac, fantasist _ . He can’t pick out more than that, a panic attack clawing in his throat as he grasps for Patrick’s hand. Patrick pulls back. Pete can’t breathe, his chest too tight for the bold, dangerous throb of his weak, messy heart. He gropes across the table top and knocks Patrick’s cup to the floor, the coffee leaching across the tiles like a bloodstain. 

Outside the window, the world has gone insane; Pete sees Chicago, Los Angeles, Paris, London, Tokyo, Sydney, distinct yet overlapped, a thousand cityscapes existing on top of one another, a layer cake of the world he gave to Patrick. A backing track to a thousand places he chose to break his best friend’s heart. A kafkaesque hellscape folding in on itself like clumsy origami. 

“Don’t you have anything to say?” Patrick demands, his voice louder now, ringing through Pete’s skull. That beautiful voice, Pete’s golden ticket straight out of Illinois. It’s ragged now, broken-sore. “Don’t you want to tell me how wrong I am?”

“You’re not—” Pete begins, trails off, slams the heel of his palm into his temple again and again to drive the thought out of his head and onto his tongue, “you’re — you’re not—”

“Not what, Pete? What am I not?”

The walls are so loud Pete’s ears may bleed from it. Patrick’s eyes change with the landscape beyond the glass, glittering from seaglass to emerald to deep, rich ruby. “You’re  _ not _ …”

“Pathetic, you drag me here, you haul me into your bullshit over and over again and you can’t even look me in the eyes and admit it. You wanted  _ pretty _ , you wanted the world to want to  _ be _ you and who’d want to be the guy fucking  _ me _ ?”

“You’re—”

“Done with you? Yeah, I think I am, I’m fucking  _ done _ with  _ you  _ and  _ this  _ and  _ us  _ and—”

“That’s not  _ true, _ ” Pete’s vocal cords don’t know how to twist to prove how very untrue that is, there is no adequate vocabulary in this or any other known language to explain the many ways in which those words do not make sense. “None of it’s true! I loved him so fucking much it made my guts, my lungs, my god-fucked heart  _ ache _ , it cracked me into more pieces than I knew how to put back together. And that’s why I couldn’t make us public, I couldn’t haul him into the village square and let them throw their ugly, hateful fucking  _ words _ at him. I—”

“Him?” Patrick snarls, vicious as storms, tempestuous with fury. “ _ Him _ ? You mean me, right?  _ I’m  _ Patrick. I’m the one you hurt over and over again, the one you threw to one side until you were bored or horny enough to claim an easy fuck. I—”

_ “You’re not Patrick!” _

And the diner falls silent. The whispers hush and hiss back into the walls, rolling back like the brackish roll of the tide against the beach. Instead of the crunch of salt and sand under his feet, Pete feels blood welling, coppery around his teeth. He release his tongue from between them slowly and concentrates on the iron-hot pain that creeps up through his jaw. It’s like his therapist always says; panic is nothing more than a temporary state of mind. He breathes through it. 

The coffee cup shatters in his hands, slicing through his skin until the blood puddles against the table and soaks into his sleeves. He whispers, “You’re  _ not _ Patrick.”

Patrick’s voice is distorted, hissing in Pete’s ear on a hot breath as he screws his eyes closed and forces himself not to look. “Better figure it out fast, Pete. You only get until the end of the storm, then he’s mine.”

Pete opens his eyes slowly and with the utmost reluctance. 

He’s back on Main Street. It’s mid-morning. He isn’t bleeding.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, next week, looking at those tags, we're going to get a visit from a man in a red suit. (Just so we're clear, it's not Santa Claus) And he is _interesting..._
> 
> Comments, kudos and theories are all welcomed! You can also come and say hi on tumblr [here!](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/sn1tchesandtalkers)


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I promised a dude in a red suit (not Santa) and I _always_ deliver on my promises. 
> 
> [](https://www.flickr.com/photos/168268289@N03/47049370981/in/dateposted-public/)

**_You_** _hurt him_ , says the voice in the back of Pete’s head, dripping insidious with venom and bitter self-loathing, **_you_** _took him for granted_.

There’s grit in his hair and crunching unpleasantly between his teeth, his whole body itching with dried sweat. This bothers him less than it should. How can he bring himself to care about anything at all when Patrick is missing — without Patrick, Pete has no heart. Without his heart, Pete has no purpose.  So, he lies on the ground and stares at the clouds gathering at the horizon and waits for something to happen.

Death, preferably.

A storm is coming. He can feel the crackle and hum of it in the air, the static prickle of impending lightning raising the hair at the back of his neck, along the length of his forearms. It makes him nervous, sends him halfway tachycardic as he waits, waits, endlessly waits for something to happen.

The music is so soft that, at first, Pete assumes he’s imagining it. He turns his eyes but not his head, the blur of buildings in his peripheral vision pulled into focus as he stares at the movie theater. There’s every possibility that Pete is imagining it, but it sounds sort of familiar. Kind of like loneliness and days spent lifting the copies of an album he ordered daily from Amazon out of neatly printed boxes. It almost sounds like _The I in Lie_ if he’s being entirely honest, and Pete prides himself on being able to spot a patented Patrick Stump classic at a hundred paces with his hands over his ears.

Oh, this is just _fantastic_. Lost in a mystical rip in the very fabric of space-time and Pete _still_ manages to find an alternate universe in which he’s haunted by Soul Punk.

He goes to his elbows first, wincing as they scrape against the cracked-up asphalt, and cocks his head like a Pomeranian. It gets louder, like someone propped a door open, popping and echoing in and out of focus like a soundcheck, the whistling shift in pitch and volume as someone figures out the sound settings.

_“... Mistake… reluctant father… walked away…”_

He remembers buying tickets to watch him play; Chicago, New York, Los Angeles. Pete filled an i-spy road trip book of venues with Patrick’s name over the door but never talked himself into crossing the threshold. He’s heard every song from behind the solid steel of a locked bar door, through breezeblock and brickwork and echoing through propped-open fire escapes. He knows Soul Punk from the outside.

He climbs to his feet and stretches his legs, rolling his shoulders and feeling them pop as he checks his arms, his clothes, his hair. He’s just the same. This makes sense; he was never part of Patrick’s timeline during this part of his life. The magic doesn’t need to glamour him, to lull them both into a false sense of belonging. He crosses the street and touches the worn wooden doors just as the first fat, heavy raindrops begin to bounce off the sidewalk, the dust darkening to dirt as the storm sets in.

It’s quiet inside the theater. In spite of the music he heard on the street the building itself is still, holding its breath in anticipation. The concession stand is bright but deserted, the popcorn mountained and slicked with butter, the soda dispensers winking cheery illumination from behind the empty counter. There’s a single carton of popcorn and a plastic-capped dixie cup on the edge of the stand.

_Eat me, drink me,_ thinks Pete. And then he does exactly that, cramming in a mouthful of corn and slurping down half the soda in one long, brain-freezing gulp.

There’s only one theater, a single set of double doors dressed to kill in faded crimson paint and chipped black push pads. Pete pauses and thinks about leaving, back out into the rain on the street and the endless playback of a nowhere town that doesn’t want him to leave. An eternity of this nothing, this echoing chamber of his own self-doubt and terrible past transgressions. This hellhole will keep him, he knows that, so he might as well play the game. He braces himself, bites his lip and, hands filled with food, pushes the door with his hip.

It’s dark inside. Silent. No hum from the popcorn machine or the refrigeration units, no low-level whisper of air conditioning or the creak of floorboards and paneling. The recessed lights in the floor illuminate the way, velveteen seats outlined in shadow like twisted monsters from fairy tales. It looks like a venue they might have played in once, somewhere back in 2005 when everything felt like a possibility instead of an ending. Patrick fucked him in the back room — if he’s recalling it correctly — came inside of him then sucked him off loose and sloppy pressed up against the door, his nails scraping scars into the paintwork.

He hovers in the galley between the seats; there’s no Ikea arrow to follow, no ticket stub sweaty in his damp palm. But there’s also no one else in the building so he shrugs, bites a mouthful of popcorn directly from the top of the carton and slumps down front row center.

The screen springs to life, the projection unit whirring overhead and scattering static across the stretched-out surface of it. The speakers hiss and pop for a moment, that low-level whispering bleeding across the room as Pete snags another piece of popcorn and waits, poised with inevitability, for the show to begin.

Pete is expecting many things as the screen hums to life and fizzes with old-school static like a 70mm instead of high-definition digital cinematography. Video footage from the camcorder he carried around when they lived out of a van and in one another’s pockets. Music videos, interviews, a series of snapshots of the life and drawn out death of Fall Out Boy, edited in such a way that Pete is always the villain. Or maybe it’ll be simpler than that. Josie and the Pussycats, perhaps, a throwback to their first date, sharing popcorn and PG-13 kisses in the back row. God, Patrick was so young, so bright and filled to bursting with hope and promise. Pete took all of that, filled him up with bitter, black ugly instead, let it seep from his veins into the ink on a page that wrapped its way around Patrick’s throat.

The speakers hiss, whispering to him from recesses in the wall – or it could be the voices, Pete is having a hard time telling the difference – as the screen pulls into focus and the lights around the room dim. He leans forward, hands braced to his knees and squints at the murky outline of a hotel room. It’s too dark to make out details, to be aware of anything more than the shifting undulation of two shadows and slow, wet noise; the undisputable sound of mouth on cock.

“Fuck yeah. You’re fucking good at that, so good. Keep going, baby, that’s it. No – no teeth, gentle, gently, that’s it, _fuck_ …”

He knows that voice. A hand closes around his windpipe, squeezing in time with the way the scene on the screen illuminates and shows him Patrick – soft, eager little Patrick with his sideburns and his hair thinning on top – on his knees and taking Gabe Saporta’s cock like it’s the fucking sacrament. Right before the hiatus, judging by the button down hanging too loose on Patrick’s newly slender frame, the flat cap tossed on the bed.

It’s official; Pete is having the worst fucking day of his life.

Patrick works his mouth and the ghost-pale hand shoved down the front of his own pants until the scene cuts. This time, Patrick’s on his hands and knees, back arched and toes curled as Gabe pounds into him from behind. Bile stains the back of Pete’s tongue and he shoves the popcorn to one side. Jealousy shouldn’t taste this bitter half a decade later, long after Pete lost the right to claim Patrick as his. He’ll still punch Gabe right in the mouth next time he sees him. He won’t say why. Gabe can probably figure it out.

“Am I better than Pete?” Gabe asks, large-knuckled hands fisting the soft, pale skin at Patrick’s hips. Pete decides a kick in the crotch couldn’t hurt, either.

And Patrick moans, arches his back and rears up, presses himself to the long, lean length of Gabe’s rangy torso and fists a hand around his own fat, pink cock. “You’re different,” he gasps, choking on thick, wet moans. Gabe wraps his hand over Patrick’s, squeezes hard enough that his knuckles glow, neon pale through the skin; Patrick groans, “ _Fuck_. Fuck yeah, you’re better. Fuck me, fuck me, _fuck me_.”

Pete considers the screen and imagines he can detach himself from it. That he can press the hot, sweaty skin of his palms to his eyes and burn out the image of Patrick’s raw, red mouth twisted open as Gabe fucks him. He can tell himself that whatever reality he’s stepped into is lying to him, that what he saw on the screen is nothing more than his own twisted imagination and fears buried so deep not even future archeologists could hope to unearth them and bring them into the sunlight.

But the thing — whatever it is — that’s keeping him here hasn’t lied to him yet. It’s twisted the presentation, for sure, but it’s spoken only truth. _Patrick’s_ truth. Which means Patrick fucked Gabe, somewhere between a room in a hotel in New York City and the neat severing of ties that came when he announced his solo project. Pete has to accept that his ex-boyfriend fucked his friend and that there is _nothing he can do about it_.

He resists the urge, somehow, to tear his seat from its mooring and throw it through the screen, to smash the means of transmission so he doesn’t have to think about it anymore. He can stand amongst the ruins like a deposed king in a tattered cloak and gutter glass crown and let the storm take them both. Does it really matter?

But the universe is, apparently, not done with kicking him when he’s down. The screen kicks into life once more. Flight cases scattered like hulking black and silver beasts, scrawled with homemade labels in Patrick’s handwriting. But that’s nothing more than set dressing, the sweaty backstage holding of some club or bar or second-rate venue. The focus of the frame is clear and Pete doesn’t want to watch. Can’t help but to watch.

“You want me like this?” Patrick asks, on his hands and knees, pale ass round and full and thrust towards the camera. The hand that touches the small of his back is just as large as Gabe’s but pale, the arm lean and long and fuzzed with red-gold hair a lot like Patrick’s.

Michael Day. Pete’s never been formally introduced. Now he thinks that’s probably for the best.

“You’re so beautiful,” Michael tells him sincerely, kissing across his shoulder blades, licking heat and slick wetness along the raised notches of his spine. Look at Patrick; this tiny, birdlike creature made of delicately visible hip bones and ribs. Pete never got him like this.

On the dirty floor, Patrick tosses back his head and smiles. It’s cold, his eyes hard and bitter. “You’re not the first person to tell me that.”

And Michael, he slides his hands around Patrick’s hips and turns him over, kisses his collar bones with abject adoration that makes Pete’s guts cramp. “Maybe I’m the first person to mean it.” He grabs Patrick’s chin, tips his face up. Patrick scowls. “Hey, come on, I’m being nice.”

“Just suck me off,” Patrick hisses, shoving Michael down between his legs, “I don’t _need_ a replacement Pete all full of adjectives and Myspace fucking poetry. I’m not your boyfriend, I’m not your lover, I’m a couple of warm holes you can fill when we’re both in the mood.”

The screen fades, Pete is left angry, confused and vaguely horny. It feels a lot like 2008 generally, if he’s honest. He wipes sticky sweat from his brow with the hem of his shirt and ignores the interested throb of his half-hard cock. Somehow, Patrick believed — believes? — himself to be unworthy of the kind of affection that Michael was offering. _Somehow_ , Patrick believes he’s nothing more than a mobilized fleshlight with the ability to fuck back. _Somehow,_ Patrick blames Pete for this. That is — like, _categorically_ not a position he intended to place Patrick into. Both figuratively and literally.

Before he can dwell on it further, the screen bursts back to life, saturating the room with color and brightness that burns Pete’s eyes. A stage show of rhythm and movement based somewhere on a tour bus on an unidentifiable stretch of freeway. It’s daylight this time, which Pete curses because it makes it far too clear; Dallon is on his hands and knees behind, Brendon up front. And Patrick? Patrick is in the middle, his damp, pink mouth stretched white at the corners as he sucks on Brendon’s cock, his pale hand fisted in Dallon’s dark hair as Dallon licks him open like he can lose himself in the wet, pink warmth of Patrick’s body.

“Good little whore,” Brendon groans; Patrick sucks harder, closes his eyes and drives back onto Dallon’s mouth.

The moans he makes aren’t the ones he made for Pete, the twist of his brow isn’t the same, the arch of his hips holds no specific memories. The Patrick he knew fucked for Hell or glory, he fucked because the passion between them was too much to be contained by one body, there had to be an overflow, an outlet, a stopcock for the way their hearts would fill. This Patrick is fucking for an ending, not because he’s horny but because he needs the dopamine, that split second when the pulse of his heart can be felt in his cock and he doesn’t have to think.

It fades before he can watch Dallon fuck him and for that, Pete remains grateful. In the sudden silence of the theater, Pete can hear his heartbeat in his throat. Then the whispering starts once more.

The projector whirs into life. This time, it’s not just the screen that lights up; it’s the walls, the ceiling, the goddamn floor flickering with a hundred different cut scenes of Patrick’s sexual dalliances that he has no desire to be a part of. A blur of faces, hands, bodies, Pete at the center of a Tilt-o-Whirl of debauchery as his stomach aches and his throat pulls tense, an impending asthma attack of furious unfairness.

It’s not so much the ones he doesn’t recognize, the faceless, nameless ones Patrick picked up in bars, at shows, in line at a fucking _In n Out_ , apparently. No, it’s the ones he _knows_ that really sting. Pete sees Travis, William, Gabe far more times than one, Matt Rubano, Ray fucking _Toro_. He sinks the blunt pads of his fingertips into his eye sockets and wonders, hysterical, if he can claw them out. If he plucks them from his head and grinds them under the heel of his shoe, will it take with them the irrefutable proof that Patrick got over him by, apparently, getting under many, _many_ other people? But Pete is not sensible, rational or normal. Guts cramping, sick and sore, he forces himself to watch.

“Why are you doing this?” he asks the wall beside him. It doesn’t reply, so Pete decides to battle belligerent structural parameters with volume and screams. “ _What the fuck are you trying to prove_?”

He hurls his drink against the screen. It bursts, a caramel-sticky bloodstain that spatters and pools against Patrick’s face. The image cuts out, the sound dies, Pete is left in an anechoic chamber of his own desperate, stuttered breathing. His fingernails bite bruises into his palms, his thighs cramp. He is slick with sweat and shaking, dizzy with the after-effect of running a gauntlet of his own crippling jealousy.

Pete has, thus far, confronted the teenage face of his own inability to control his poor sense of humor around his best friend. He has run an endless marathon of streets, torn himself bloody on undergrowth in a desperate bid to follow the breadcrumb trail of Patrick’s existence. He’s faced the most bitter, jaded incarnation of the lover he loves the most and then played voyeur to the intimacies of a life Patrick tried to build without him. He’s really not having the best day, is the upshot and his confused cock shrinks slowly in his jeans as the adrenaline burns out of his nervous system.

It was only a panic erection, he tells himself, an unguarded response of this, his Pavlov’s prick, to hearing the way Patrick moaned on the screen. He rests a hand against the sad softness of his crotch and breathes a sigh of relief.

Which he sucks in, immediately and hard enough that his lungs burn, when a drum kicks to life not twenty paces in front of him. The screen is gone. The theater is now a venue, the stage illuminated by a couple of spotlights that pick out a drum kit with no drummer and the eerie, Slenderman shape of a vintage microphone.

And Patrick.

Bleach blond and dressed to kill in a tight red suit, his eyes powdered with dark eyeshadow and the neat, pointed thrust of dollar store horns twisting up through his hair. The forbidden representation of a Patrick he didn’t get to speak to but everyone else got to fuck. Pete’s dick jumps hard again in so few beats of his heart that he’s concerned he may sprain something. Over the beat of the drums, the trickle of the guitars and keyboard, Patrick growls into the mic, cups it in black-gloved hands with a lover’s touch. Pete feels himself begin to salivate.

“ _Whenever I find it, it’s none of your business, now wherever I go, go, go it’s not your concern_.. _._ ”

The twist to the lyrics is subtle but pointed, Patrick’s eyes fixed on him from the shadow of his newfound use of cosmetics. He rolls his hips as he sings, grinds into the mic stand and introduces Pete to the very real possibility that the most erotic moment of his life may be taking place without anyone laying a single hand on him. If he comes in his pants, he’s not sure if he’ll feel relieved or disappointed that he doesn’t get to use this, the most magnificent erection he’s ever sported, for anything more interesting. _I’m not broken-hearted,_ Patrick assures him, burning with this furious confidence that he seems to both blame Pete for and want to seduce him with in equal measure, _I’m just kinda pissed off_.

Pete is not specifically aware of moving. But must have done so because he’s now pressed up against the stage, one hand cupped to his crotch as the other braces to the worn wooden boards under Patrick’s feet.

As Patrick sings, he kneels. His thighs, wrapped in the oil slick of that shiny red suit, are inches from the edge of the stage. This has the fortuitous upside of bringing the half-hardness of his cock close enough that Pete could brush it with his mouth if he leaned in the barest amount. Since Pete appears to be under the influence of something intoxicating, something that sings through his bloodstream like alcohol and leaves him woozy and restless, he closes his eyes and attempts to do exactly that.

He smacks face first into the boards, his nose exploding into glass shards of brilliant pain. There’s blood on the back of his tongue, spotting the stage and the back of his hands, but he ignores it. Patrick smirks from two feet further back then he was and beckons Pete forward with a finger peeled from the pornographic hold he has on the mic as he bursts into the middle eight. He tips his head back, exposes the pale column of his throat and strokes himself slowly with the other, his hand sliding down over his neck, his chest, the new flatness of his stomach and finally — God, fucking _finally_ — cupping the richly swollen outline of his prick. Pete’s brain is entirely numb from the sudden redirection of every single panicking blood cell in his vascular system to the steady, blood-painful throb of his restricted cock.

_“Petey we were so good, but I wonder, but I wonder, but I wonder, if we’d be so good…”_

Pete is a relatively athletic man and the stage isn’t high. He braces, jumps, attempts to climb to his feet at the edge of the stage and is promptly knocked from them, the air punched from his lungs as he hits the ground on his back. It’s a testament to the diminishing oxygen saturation in his brain that all he does is grunt, blink and then haul himself back to the stage. There is no word in any written, verbal or non-verbal language that adequately summarizes the way his body convulses as Patrick winks at him, licks his lips and gyrates his hips in time to the music.

“ _Crawl_ ,” Patrick sneers, in the beat between two notes.

In any other situation, Pete might laugh. But with his dick chafing sore in his jeans, it doesn’t seem particularly funny, any witty comments stolen from him as he does precisely what he’s told. Belly low and the stage unforgiving beneath his hands and knees, he approaches Patrick braced for the kick. Instead, that gloved hand cups his cheek, the cool, dry pad of his thumb snaking along Pete’s lower lip.

There’s a reason, a nagging pebble-in-the-shoe thought poking at the delicate, tender corners of Pete’s psyche. He came here to find something. He came here to find _Patrick_. Who, conveniently, he has located and who, _inexorably_ , seems to wish to map a trail to resolution via the scenic route of every erogenous zone Pete possesses, starting with the heated hollow of his heartbeat in the curve of his throat.

Because Pete has lost the ability to speak, he moans, sharp and absolute, head tipped back and crotch thrust forward, inviting Patrick to touch the impossible hardness of his straining erection as it threatens to burst through his zipper. Patrick refuses — unfairly, Pete thinks — and instead laughs softly, “Did you think it would be this simple?”

“I was hoping it might be,” Pete admits, reaching for the buckle of Patrick’s belt, “Can I?”

The lights cut. Pete can hear him breathing, feel the warmth of him as he murmurs through the ink blackness of it, “Did you like my home movies? I made them all with you in mind, you know.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Pete says, “I don’t see Gabe here looking for you. Or Travie, or Dallon or fucking _Brendon_. Seriously, Patrick? _Brendon?”_

“Your jealousy is both superficially flattering and deeply pathetic.”

“Good to know. It’s what I’m famous for, isn’t it? Superficiality dressed up in vainglorious lyricism that fakes emotional depth. Scratch away the ink and you just find more ink.” The spotlight flares up once more, they are naked and somewhere else, somewhere dark and warm where the worn, wooden boards have given way to soft, elegant silk. Pete holds up his arms in demonstration, “I’m pretty sure I bleed blog post pretension at this point. Hey, nice cock, by the way. Can I suck it?”

“If you say please.”

“Since when do we engage in formalities?”

“Since I turned into something that was never yours to touch,” Patrick says, smiling, his teeth very sharp at the corners. Pete shrugs and hopes he seems as desperate as he feels. He’s spent half a lifetime running from the implication of dramatic overexpression in the face of his best friend turned lover turned mortal enemy. He touches the horns on Patrick’s head as he pulls him closer; they’re plastic, cold, faintly ridiculous on a grown man with his dick out. “I don’t know, if we’re going to do this, it feels like it should be done with propriety,” Patrick kisses his throat, “with respect,” he bites along the stubble-rough of Pete’s jaw and hovers, close enough to his lips that their breath can catch together, “and with due diligence.”

“You’re not a lawyer.”

“I’m like one,” Patrick counters, taking the impossible hardness of Pete’s rigid cock into his hand; Pete bites his lip and internally recites Enter Sandman, backwards, to prevent himself from coming across Patrick’s stomach, “we wrote a song about it. Remember?”

“Land never never to off we’re,” Pete says nonsensically, Patrick’s hand in the center of his chest shoving him back and down and into the warmth beneath them, “I’m not sure I’m capable of accessing long or short-term memories with you pulling on my dick.”

Patrick’s hands explore him like he’s brand new — an unearthed artifact, a painting of unequal exquisiteness. His fingernails scratch white lines along the gold of Pete’s skin, trail through the brackish curl of his pubic hair and touch, electric sharp, the tight skin of his testicles, the ridge of his perineum. He leaves heat like brimstone in the wake of his grave-cold fingertips, he lights Pete on fire from the inside, burning from his core like a volcanic eruption. He wonders — dizzy — how many people they can take out with _this_ explosion.

“Well,” Patrick starts softly, “what a wonderful time to forget and what an unparalleled opportunity to create new ones.” Patrick shifts, graceful with animal litheness, straddles Pete’s shuddering chest and, casually, like it doesn’t matter at all, brings the rosy pale smoothness of his ass to Pete’s face, “We can start right here, if you like.”

“Oh _God_ , yes,” Pete groans around the thick sweep of his tongue against Patrick’s ass cheek. He props himself up on an elbow and uses the fingers of his right hand to spread Patrick open for him, to share his secrets. They look good — dark and large around the tight pink of Patrick’s hole — and he bites a kiss in celebration, right into the meat of Patrick’s thigh. He has, he finds, very little else to add as his mouth tastes the salt of Patrick’s skin, so he mumbles around tooth and tongue and swollen, wet lips, “I think that sounds fucking _fantastic_.”

He licks Patrick open with languor, with unhurried strokes of his tongue like he can part him down the middle, tongue probing up into the slick, smooth inside of him. There’s drool on his chin, on his hands, Patrick squirmy-soft and eager as his sticky tipped dick winds interesting abstract patterns against Pete’s chest. Patrick’s ass is damp against his face, sweat and spit making him sticky — Pete can think of no place he’d rather be.

“Remember when I used to do this after I’d fucked you,” Pete asks, muffled, his voice humming back to him like feedback, two damp fingertips rubbing the sensitive stretch of Patrick’s perineum. “When I’d eat your fucked-out ass until you begged me to let you come?”

Patrick replies, but not to Pete’s question. “I know what you’re thinking,” and he sits up, puts his weight exquisitely across Pete’s face until he’s half-smothered in the mouthfeel of Patrick, “and I’m not going to suck your dick. I’m not even going to _touch_ it.”

Against Patrick’s ass, Pete grins, _“Good.”_ He wants to be left wanting, he wants to ache down to his bone marrow, to replace his molecular structure as it is with chains and links of desperate need. He wants to die here, under this spotlight and on these sheets and find himself reborn, rising like the phoenix Patrick sings about, something new and whole and worthy. He says it again, but no sound comes out, just a whisper of air against warm, wet skin, “Good.”

He’s hard enough to lose sensation in his fingers and toes, to lose the function of all fine motor control that isn’t focused on the tip of his arcing tongue. This is a fair trade: his mouth for Patrick’s moans. He laps around the tender rim of Patrick’s hole, tastes him like he’s melting, dripping, chasing every drop with slow, unhurried licks. Then, when Patrick is rocking on him, riding him down into the mattress as his cock throbs and his head swims with abstract streaks of color and light, he drives back inside. He thrusts his tongue deep and sure, like he wants to thrust his cock. Above him, Patrick stiffens, his spine an endless curve of pale, jeweled with sweat, his ribs and shoulders tense. Pete wants to be his absolution, his benediction, he wants to pass the lips of this beautiful monster like bread and wine.

Above him, platinum head tipped back like he can see the stars, Patrick makes a low, animal noise that Pete feels all the way through his nervous system. Misfiring synapses like runway markers, hands curved into those slender, delicate hips, Pete grazes his teeth over Patrick’s hole and feels him give, warm and wet and open. Patrick sounds like he’s been punched, electrocuted, thrown from the top of the Sears tower, his hand a fist in the trimmed curl of Pete’s pubic hair. He sounds like a supernova, like falling stars and the acid stench of burning vinyl on a dark February almost-morning. Pete reaches down and, very firmly, squeezes his own cock.

He pulls back gasping, “You want my dick, all of it, don’t fucking lie to me.” That he possesses the ability to speak is a modern-day miracle. Give him a glass of water, he’ll exchange it for a vintage champagne waterfall, all glitter and sparkle, with a wave of his hand. “You need it like I do.”

“Penetrative sex isn’t exactly something that’s worked out well for us in the past,” Patrick is too controlled, and Pete is spinning like a merry-go-round, “is this where we’re going? Again?”

“I remember it differently,” Patrick slides down his chest and stomach, he leaves spit and sweat in his wake, his hot, wet thighs tight against Pete’s hips, “you never seemed to complain when it was happening.”

Patrick levels a glare over his shoulder, “My dick is motivated by terrible things. It also has a spectacularly short memory.”

Pete strokes his own, feels it already wet at the head, “Mine doesn’t.”

Patrick turns, his blood-dark cock bobbing lazily over Pete’s poor choice in abdominal tattoos. He raises his shoulders in a shrug and asks, eyes blazing, “Was that all it ever was? All those girls that you took home, took to the bus, to hotels — was my dick just a fetish for you? Am _I_ just a fetish? All pretty like this,” he tweaks Pete’s nipple and finds the golden thread between that and the pulsing, wound-tender tip of his cock, “all blond and pale and not for you? Did you watch the videos, see the suits, did you want this?”

“Oh, God,” Pete groans. Which is not an answer.

Slowly, oh so slowly, Patrick lowers himself with smooth determination, a cataclysmic forest fire of desire burning brilliance through Pete’s groin. Pete grips the base of his dick, for friction or pressure or just to feel that he’s real and solid and hasn’t, in fact, ascended to some entirely new metaphysical plane.

“Fuck, _Brendon_ ,” Patrick whimpers. There’s anger like rocket fuel low in Pete’s gut, it burns through him red and bitter and ugly, but he doesn’t react. That’s what Patrick wants. Like he can read Pete’s mind — and God, but Pete’s imagined a few times that this brilliant little beast could do just that — he smiles, toothy and wide. “Sorry.”

He doesn’t mean it.

Pete’s dick is all the way inside of him, pressing into hot, hidden places like he hasn’t in half a decade. He wants to flip him over, wants to bend him in half and watch the way he can take his cock. He’s done that before, spitting down into the pink tightness of his hole, working him open with his fingers in the back room of a tour bus somewhere in middle America then riding him through the mattress. Now, he pushes, holds, takes a breath and waits for Patrick to move.

When he starts, it’s slow. The gradual undulation of his hips over Pete’s like he’s moving to a filthy beat. Under Pete’s hands, he has no doubt that Patrick’s thighs are red, hot, branded with the shape of his fingers as he bites his lip and closes his eyes. This will never be anything but awesome, he decides, there’s no possible place that Pete feels completion like he gets when he’s inside of Patrick. He was the first, it doesn’t matter if he’s the last, he’s the one seated thick and hard and desperate for this collection of stammered heartbeats. He touches Patrick’s chest. It doesn’t flutter.

Patrick takes his own impossibly hard dick into his hand and strokes with deliberation and purpose. He times it well, bouncing on Pete’s lap as he throws back his head and shows of his porcelain pale throat, the thick, lilac strain of his carotid artery like a bullseye. Pete is stupid for this kid, has always been, will never be anything but. He feels like heaven, looks like hell, Pete touches a hand to one horn and jerks, panicked. It no longer feels like plastic. It’s solid, fixed, bone-warm and dry.

He gasps, “What—”

“Shh,” Patrick’s eyes are so dark, the color bleeding into the eyeshadow and kohl around them, charcoal smudges against the paperwhite of his skin, “this is what you want.”

And it _is_ , so Pete stops asking questions, focusing instead on the way Patrick rides him, uses him, takes his cock like it owes him a favor. He takes Patrick’s face in both hands, feels the threat of stubble burning under his lips as they kiss endless. That knot in his groin draws tighter, harder, pulsing with impending explosion as Patrick squirms on his cock with desperation. Pete holds him still, takes his hips in both hands and pins him in place, rutting up into him as he murmurs filth and want and honeyed desire, each inward thrust bringing him agonizingly close to the silk-edged brilliance buried deep within.

When Patrick comes it is sudden. Like a punch to his gut as he doubles over, fists his fingernails into the tender skin at Pete’s collar bone and fucks the last glorious high into ribbons of pearl that streak Pete’s skin. “Fuck! Fucking, _fuck!_ Stay with me, never leave me.”

“Fuck yeah,” Pete gasps, his nails sinking ten sharp brands into Patrick’s skin as he takes the last — few — thrusts —

Pete collapses, possibly dies.

Pete is complete.

*

There’s come on his belly, on his thighs and wet in his pubic hair. Patrick stills above him, his cock pink and half-hard and lovely as he swipes through the mess on Pete’s tattoo, dipping into the ticklish hollow of his navel. He offers it on two fingertips, eyebrow quirked as Pete sucks away with bittersalt of it, hands tucked behind his head. He sees the world in that burst of sudden flavour — the world beyond this darkened stage or bedroom or warm, wet thought lingering somewhere in his smashed-glass skull — and blinks, punch-drunk into Patrick’s eyes.

“So,” Patrick’s smile is luminescent, dangerous, all tooth and claw, “what do you say? You’ll stay here with me?”

And Pete laughs. He laughs so hard his stomach cramps, his throat tight and sore as Patrick blinks down at him, confused. He laughs until the softening length of his dick slides free and his eyes stream at the corners. He laughs until the sound becomes weak, until he can huff and sigh and grin up at the man sitting astride him.

“You’re not Patrick,” and he says this with confident conviction, “you almost had me. But you’re not Patrick.”

It smiles, well, it bares its teeth, eyes dark as the eyeshadow around them, the blue-gold iris lost to the black-hole darkness of his pupils, “Then who am I?”

“A decent lay,” Pete shrugs, glowing with the victory of it, “a pretty distraction, maybe. But you’re not him. The thing is,” he starts to laugh once more, “the thing _is_ , you listened to _him_ , didn’t you?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Yeah you do. You copied every detail from _his_ head, and that’s what let you down,” he wipes his fingertip through the come on his chest, licks with stage-ready showmanship. “You taste how _he_ thinks he tastes, not how _I_ taste him.”

“So—”

Pete laughs, a short, sweet burst of summer sound, “ _So_ , what I’m saying _is_ … he tastes like you, only sweeter.”

For a fraction of a second; half a heartbeat; an inhale, Pete thinks he sees the true form of the thing above him. He catches a glimpse of skin gray like volcanic ash, marbled with hard red veins, the hollow dark of empty eye sockets and magnificent wings that stretch out, leather and sinew. His stomach turns, he considers throwing up. The darkness falls once more, a vulgar rush of heat that engulfs Pete’s body and leaves him sweaty, panicking, thrashing in this unending coffin of suffocating shadow. Just as suddenly, the world stills, not-quite-Patrick’s voice burns in his ear.

“It doesn’t matter. You’re too late. You really did figure on not figuring yourself out and now you can’t _possibly_ win.”

But, the thing is, Pete thinks he might have figured it out after all. There is a light at the end of this particular hallway, a shimmer and haze of hope if he squints hard enough, reaches far enough. The enigma is cracking open around him like a smashed bone and he knows — he _knows_ — where he’ll find Patrick. He opens his mouth to vocalize this but the words are stolen on a scream as he tips into freefall, feels himself crashing down through air and space and nothingness and wonders, hysterical, if he’s falling into hell.

Pete hits the ground with a thud that knocks the air from his lungs like a sucker punch. He is drenched in sweat and the front of his jeans are sticky-wet with come. He blinks into the muted grey light and feels the dust and rain whip his face.

He’s on Main Street and the storm is here.

He has no time to lose.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Has Pete figured it out? Will he find Patrick and save them both? Find out next week!
> 
> Comments, kudos and theories are all welcomed! You can also come and say hi on tumblr [here!](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/sn1tchesandtalkers)


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, the end of another fic! I tried my best to capture the fairy tale feeling against a midwestern backdrop - listening to Save Rock and Roll on a neverending loop - and I really hope you guys enjoy the final chapter! Will they all live happily ever after?

_Put on your warpaint._

The rain whips through Pete’s hair, stings his skin and if he imagined he wanted a hoodie back in the woods, he was not prepared to contend with a supernatural, end of days storm. He gets to his feet, takes a glancing blow from a two by four of unknown provenance and feels blood on his brow, sticky and hot, under his fingertips. It’s been one of those days.

The town is tearing itself down around him, buildings razed in whirling twisters of wood, brick, metal. It’s true; Pete is _definitely_ not in Kansas anymore. Tipturned and dizzy, he crouches just in time for a girder to sail over his head. He gets the sense that this time, if he takes half of the Post Office to the face, he’s not going to get the chance to come back and try again.

If this doesn’t work, he is completely fucked.

He has a theory. Admittedly, it’s not one that he’s really sat down and worked out with pencil and paper, what with the whole being caught in the center of an apocalyptic, force five hurricane but the theory goes something like this: Pete has been sent to this place to resolve whatever issue it is that festers beneath the surface of Patrick-and-Pete, to lance the wound they didn’t clean out properly with the hiatus.

Sub-theory: Pete’s own fears are the thing holding them back, the reason that the edges of the bloody gash they left behind can’t knit and join. He fears hurting Patrick, that much is clear from the basement of a house in not-Glenview. He fears rejecting Patrick, forced to confront the reality of what he did in a diner that doesn’t exist. He fears the Patrick he didn’t get to know, that Soul Punk built a bridge between them and Confessions of a Pariah burnt it down behind him and now Patrick is an island he’ll never reach.

But, if Pete is entirely honest, the thing he fears most is Patrick outgrowing him, destroying the land mass to his peninsula himself and leaving Pete alone. He doesn’t want to exist in a world where Patrick can be happier without him. This is problematic – he ducks to avoid the wing of a pickup truck – because, honestly, Pete is not the sort of person who makes people around him _happy_. It’s a character flaw he’s discussed with therapists and wrapped in lyrics and he’s not sure it’s figuring itself out the way he hoped. He’s working on it, okay?

So, _where do broken hearts go, can they find their way home_ , if Pete may be permitted to quote Whitney as he traverses the end of his own personal hell. If punk songs of the early part of the millennium taught him anything, it’s that people attempting to kick free of the brick dragging them down head straight to the nearest mode of cross-country public transportation.

And Nowhere has a bus station.

It’s difficult to run against the rising tide of whatever furious magic they’ve awoken but Pete gives it the old college try. Hell, he gives it a better try than he _ever_ gave college because he holds a doctorate in Patrick Stump and he will not be broken by the final assignment. He stumbles and falls and he gets back up again and he falls again and he crawls on his hands and knees and he is lacerated by a dozen different shards of flying glass and none of it matters because he has to reach Patrick.

There’s someone up ahead, someone dressed in a cardigan and hat with feathered blond hair that isn’t stirred by the wind. Pete doubles his efforts and skitters towards them on spidering limbs, snagging a handful of their jeans as something heavy and solid catches him in the midsection and steals his ability to breathe, to think.

Whoever it is, they crouch down and touch his cheek. The world is still for a second as Pete wheezes ugly breaths. Patrick smiles at him, but not the Patrick he knows. This one is softer, older, there are lines around his eyes and creased into his forehead as he tips back the peak of his cap for a moment. The world around them calms, catching them in an inverse snow globe of tranquility as the storm rages just beyond them.

“Patrick?”

“I’m not, but I will be,” he says and shrugs his shoulders. Everyone here is so impossibly cryptic, like a David Lynch movie or the explanation of a Lynch movie explained by stoned college kids. “I can protect you but not for long. You need to run, you need to keep your head down and, most importantly, you need to make sure you don’t come back for me. I’m not him.”

“Where is my boy?” Pete asks, delirious. He’s split into eight different versions of Pete Wentz and he’s no longer sure which one is behind the wheel.

“He hopes that you’re a gentleman,” this not Patrick smiles crookedly and rubs his thumb over Pete’s cheek. He wears a wedding band and there’s no conceivable way that’s not significant because _everything_ here is significant. “Where would he go, the last good thing about this part of town?”

“The bus station?” Pete asks hopefully which is insane because there’s no hope here and the bus station is still so far away and the town is tearing itself apart down the seams. “Please God, if pop punk taught me anything, it taught me how to run away.”

This older, softer Patrick strokes his hair and nods, he whispers, “Go. Don’t come back. No matter what you hear.”

Pete drags himself to his feet. He gets back up _again_. He leans in and kisses not Patrick, soft and sure and on the mouth. “I’ll make sure I’m worth it. Worth him.”

Patrick grins and shoves him backwards and directly into the path of the front door of the movie theater. Pete has no idea if he should call him a dick or brace for impact but… nothing happens. The door moves around him and Pete is staggering towards the bus station once more. He’s bleeding from many places, sweat and rainwater blinding him as he makes the front doors with Herculean effort, but somehow, nothing touches him.

Behind him, someone screams, an agonized scrape of sound that burns Pete’s eardrums. He doesn’t look back. He falls through the door and onto his ass just in time to see the shadow of a car whisk by, precisely where he was standing. He has no time to mourn for the other Patrick. He needs to find his own.

Inside, the bus station is like a graveyard, deserted like the stripped raw ribcage of roadkill. Pete hurries through and crosses his fingers for good luck. If this doesn’t work, he has no other ideas.

Because Nowhere can read his mind, and Nowhere is an asshole of a town, the shapes of waiting benches and storage lockers looming into mausoleums and headstones as he approaches. The station shifts and changes and, summoned by the force of his poorly applied will, this place _is_ a graveyard. He twists through weeds and dirt-choked graves as the storm thunders on around him and there are so many names he recognizes, so many people he fucked over on his way to the top.

“Patrick?” he calls, the flashing sign over his head informing him that the last bus is ready to depart. “Patrick! Where the fuck _are_ you?”

His voice disturbs them, the broken dreams that live beneath Nowhere. They tear at him, rotting hands thrust from earth that oozes between the split floor tiles, some horrible memory of a Romero movie, until one snags his ankle, trips him and he falls through this nightmare to land badly, on his shoulder, on a grave fresh with powdered dirt.

He knows exactly which name he’ll see before he even looks up, he is Scrooge and this is the ghost of Christmas yet to come, but the sight of it still punches the air from his lungs. Patrick Martin Stumph. His grave is closest to the exit – he almost made it out of this, Pete’s Night of the Living Dead Memories, alive.

“No,” Pete whispers, aware acutely of the accuracy in the statement ‘too numb to cry’. He claws at a handful of wet dirt and brings it to his mouth, he shoves it inside, tastes it rotten and decaying on his tongue, clogged with dead leaves. He wants to taste the last thing Patrick tasted. He wants to cease to be. He’ll lie here and die here, forever with Patrick, but he needs to be closer. “I’ll find you,” he swears to the fistfuls of dirt crushed between his fingers, “I’ll fucking find you and I’ll hold you and we’ll go out together, I swear. I can’t save us – love can’t save us – but I can give you that.”

Pete digs. He claws at handfuls of wet rotten earth until it blackens his wet swollen fingernails, until the blood mixes with dirt and slides in messy rivers across the back of his hands. Pete was out of time ten minutes ago but he will find Patrick or die trying, he’ll dig a hole right through the molten core of the earth if it means he gets to touch him one more time before the inevitable.

So, he digs and he tosses the dirt behind him, scraping through it like a dog until his nails hit something hard, followed immediately by something soft. Fingertips, clawing back against his own, bloodied and red and dark with dirt. He yanks his hands back. He screams.

Pete is not an otherworld physicist so he doesn’t attempt to explain the way that whatever he’s digging out of the earth appears to be attempting to dig him out, too. There is no earthly explanation for the way he is simultaneously in the grave and in the bus station-slash-graveyard and Patrick – _Patrick!_ – streaked with sweat and mud and blood is doing just the same.

Their worlds, their prisons built on tribulations and punishments, mesh together. Pete falls both backwards and forwards and lands, sprawled on his back, with Patrick between his legs. He’s laughing, crying, gasping, choking, _drowning_ in the need to hold on tight and, yes, this erection is celebratory. He thinks he ought to talk to someone about his inappropriate tendencies to experience extremes of emotion with the rigidity of his cock. It’s his top priority once they get out of here.

“You’re a fucking weird guy, Wentz,” Patrick is laughing, crying against his throat. The mud streaks his face with his blood, Pete’s blood and he must have been thinking out loud. “Stop talking about your dick right now, I can’t even… You were… I had to live through Best Buy, Pete. I had to live through it over and fucking over and you can’t – you don’t get to fucking leave me again, do you hear me?”

Above them, the roof of the bus station lifts away. The sky is like waves, crashing angry and deep and so fucking dark. “Who else did you see?” Pete demands, thinking of basements and diners and dark, velvet stages. “What the fuck is this place?”

“I saw you,” Patrick admits – something crashes through the building, brick or bone or metal and Pete flips them over, rolls them under a bench. Their mouths are very close, Patrick’s warm, soft, his breath beading like sweat against Pete’s lips. His shirt is ripped, hanging off his shoulder and his pants have a distinctly unfashionable gash across the knee. “Shit fuck! I saw so many different versions of you and so many ways I fucked you up.”

There is no version of Patrick that did anything but improve every version of Pete.

“Did you fuck him?” Pete demands and wonders which version of him was the seducer. Not the other half to the Soul Punk puzzle piece, that’s for sure, not the half-starved single father who could barely place one foot in front of the other without considering how those steps could lead him directly in front of a semi-truck on the 101.

Patrick grimaces, “Pete, these things are monsters! That’s,” he shoves Pete’s face into the tiles and spares them both the sliced-bologna experience of the nearby exploding window, “it’s — it’s fucking _sick!”_

“You did then,” Pete breathes a sigh of relief and Patrick laughs, out of place in this hellscape. “Thank God, I thought I was the only monsterfucker.”

“Okay, yes, we’re both as fucked up as one another. Can we leave now?”

“You lost your hat.”

“I’m not sure that’s important enough to stop us hauling ass out of here immediately if not sooner.”

He touches Patrick’s cheek, “Are you sure you’re the right one?”

“I swear to God, Wentz,” Patrick says and his voice is the right voice, his eyes are the right eyes and there’s this sarcastic edge to his voice like Japanese steel. “I will kill you myself if you don’t get on your fucking feet.”

“Listen, I need to tell you something,” says Pete, even as Patrick is hauling them both to their feet, dragging him sprinting for the final bus to depart this town named Nowhere. “I learnt a lot about myself and about us and I think it’s really, _super_ important that we communicate more, because—”

“Pete, I’m like, seriously _stoked_ you learnt from all of this and in like, literally _any other situation_ I’d be all for a mutual therapy session or a congratulatory blowjob. Both, probably. But, you know, could we maybe have this conversation when the town we’re in isn’t about to be sucked into the asshole of the fucking multiverse?”

Pete grins, “Let’s hit the road.”

“ _Roads?_ Where we’re going, we don’t need roads!” That Patrick can quote Back to the Future right now as they raise towards hell or glory on splitting, burning floor tiles, is the reason Pete loves him. He catches sight of the glorious round of Patrick’s ass. Okay, the 80s movie thing is _one_ of the reasons he loves him.

They race across the bus station graveyard, dodging the rotting hands that grab at their shoes. Patrick snags his toes on blue-black fingertips and stumbles, the ground rushing up as he plummets down but Pete catches him, hauls him up by the back of his shredded to shit shirt and pushes him on through the rubble. They’re forty feet from the bus. Thirty-five. Each push of his thighs screams with the effort, his lungs burning like the air is molten, casting his lungs in copper. The bus doors are still open, the engine idling, a Greyhound in Union Station and not the last elevator car directly out of hell.

“I love you!” he shouts, from his fucked-raw throat, choking on the smoke and debris and the dead things tossed into the air. He shouts it because he has to, because his vocal cords need to know the shape of it before they fucking die in this hell dimension and the world they came from moves on without them. He shouts it because through everything and in the end, it’s Pete’s universal truth. He loves Patrick like breathing, like blinking, like the earth moving through the celestial endlessness of space around the constant warmth of an ever-present sun. “I love you.”

They’re no more than ten feet from the bus doors when the earth opens up in front of them.

Pete lurches to a halt, his toes scrabbling at the crater’s edge of the yawning chasm, the tiles and concrete rising up like the rotten maw of some beast of the underworld. Patrick slips, teeters, screams. Pete grabs him by the scruff and hauls him backwards.

“Fuck!” Patrick screams. The air around them is hot, it smells of decay and brimstone — not that Pete has ever specifically smelled brimstone but, like, put a gun to his head and he’d go with this being it — the bus is _right there_ and there is no way they can make it. “Oh, fuck _this_. We did it, we — we fucking found each other and we made it and it can’t — this isn’t _fair!”_

Life isn’t fair, Pete thinks as he jogs back two paces, loosens his shoulders with a shake and attempts to apply physics he doesn’t understand to a leap they can’t possibly make, “I think we can do it.”

“What? Are you _high?”_ Patrick asks and yes, Pete is high, he’s high on the knowledge that they did it, that they figured one another out. That counts for something. It _has_ to count for something. “There’s no fucking _way_ we can jump that far.”

“You can make it,” Pete says carefully. “You can.”

The thing is, Patrick is still a small guy. Not Soul Punk small — God, but Pete is never going to forget the way his ribs felt under his hands, those hip bones, collar bones, vivid and sharp — but still a fairly tiny dude, he can’t weigh more than 140, soaked to the bone. Pete can bench more than that. He doesn’t have to propel him far, not much at all, but with the bulk of Pete’s weight thrown at him _just right_ there’s every possibility that Patrick can make it.

Pete eyes the fall. He won’t think about that.

“We’re going to die,” says Patrick flatly. “We’re going to plummet straight into that hole and Satan himself is going to spend the rest of eternity demanding blowjobs.”

Pete grins and hopes it doesn’t tremble at the corners, “Your confidence in me is awe-inspiring.”

Patrick pauses; the world around them is still falling apart, the bus doors creak and begin to close. He shrugs, “Fuck it. It’s a good day to go out.”

They back up together, not far, the world is falling away around them and now it’s two islands; two lost boys and a broken-down bus. Pete feels a pang for their van but resolves to think about that later — he eyes the drop into darkness — much later.

“Are you ready?” he asks. For someone who is about to die, he feels remarkably calm. He wonders if Bronx will still exist in the new world without him. He hopes, if he does, that Patrick tells him how much Pete adores him.

“No,” Patrick admits, his smile shakey, his hands moreso. He grips Pete’s fist in his, sweaty and too tight. “You fired me out of a stage, once upon a tour, like a toaster strudel.”

“You were the best flavor I could think of,” Pete says. “I used to cover you in frosting afterward, remember?”

“God, you’re disgusting. I love you.”

The ground is falling away from under them, the pixelated fall of a video game and Pete doesn’t have time to kiss him but he does it anyway. Because this will be the last time. He holds on a little tighter and shouts over the roar of the end of this world, “On three. One… two… _three!”_

They run. His lungs burn and the world falls away from under their shoes and they’re springing for the ledge, hurling themselves forward. He gets a hand into the small of Patrick’s back right at the ledge, and yes, his biceps burn with the effort as he strains and he pushes and he throws Patrick forward as he springs from his toes.

Patrick shoves him, too.

This isn’t part of the plan and they trip one another up. They stumble, together, hands locked into one another’s shirts as they stagger over the lip and Patrick is a fucking idiot, a fool, that he tried to save Pete — unworthy, unlovable Pete —  in the same way Pete is trying to save him. And now, instead, they’ll die together and the world beyond this will turn without them. Maybe, Pete thinks, maybe that’s not so bad.

They stop falling. Abruptly, the air crushed from their lungs as they crash into one another, crash into the ground but they’re _not falling_. Patrick cries out; no one’s leg should bend that way, Pete’s sure of it. Pete looks up and there he is, staggering, dying and bloodied but still moving, not-Patrick in his baseball cap and cardigan, weaving incantations in the graceful, cool-water flow of his hands.

“Go!” he screams, tries to scream but instead blood bubbles from his mouth. It’s red as rubies, glittering like gold. “Go! Both of you!”

The rubble forms a path between where they landed and the bus. They can still make it and Pete is hauling Patrick, dragging him, too terrified and stupefied to make a Wayne’s World joke.

Patrick makes it for him, weak and thin, “No stairway.”

Pete smiles, crooked, agonized and still hauling them inch by desperate inch, “Denied.”

The doors creak ahead of them, the bus beginning to tip and tumble. He throws Patrick through the doors and, with a final, bone-weary effort, he hurls himself after him. They fall into nothing, through the door and down into darkness. They don’t scream but they kiss, Patrick’s mouth sweet and warm and damp against his as they plummet down into the guts and bones of the universe.

They land with a thump.

It’s mid-morning. They are in the galley of the bus between the bunks and the kitchenette. They are not bleeding.

“Dudes,” says Joe, nearly tripping over them in his quest for Froot Loops. “Get a fucking room.”

Pete is sprawled between Patrick’s spread thighs. This is good as that is, honestly, Pete’s favorite place in the world to be. He touches Patrick’s unbruised face, his unbloodied throat, tugs at his unripped shirt. He raises his eyebrows and says, “Huh.”

“We had a town,” says Patrick to Joe’s back.

“We burnt it down,” Pete adds.

“To the ground?” adds Andy from behind the curtain of his own bunk. “Are we in a Dr Seuss poem?”

“What year is it?” Pete asks carefully. He doesn’t remove himself from between Patrick’s thighs. Honestly, they’re amazing thighs, he might have to stake out real estate here, farm the land, never move.

“Are you high?” Joe clashes bowls and spoons and milk. “Wait… am _I_ high?”

“Who’s the president?” Pete continues. “Do you remember who Patrick is?” He gestures helpfully in Patrick’s face; Patrick swats him away irritably which is both rude and unkind. “Are we in a band? Does Patrick sing?”

Joe pauses, the rattle of cereal into the bowl silenced for a moment. He raises his shoulders. “You guys are fucking weird.” He retreats with his spoils.

Pete looks down at Patrick, Patrick blinks back up at Pete. He says, “Who the fuck was that who got us onto the bus.”

“Would you believe me if I told you he looked a lot like you? You’re cute when you’re older, by the way, kind of squishy, and you rock a wedding ring.”

“I met an older you,” Patrick informs him sagely. “Funnily enough, he wore a wedding ring, too. His hair was _awful_ , though.”

“There’s no Pete in any possible universe who has hair that’s anything less than groundbreaking. Wedding rings, though. Where do you suppose we found those?”

“More to the point,” Patrick murmurs, grinding up, Pete sees stars, anoxic explosions from lack of breathable air on the floor of the bus. “Do you think we have boring married sex? Or is it still exciting?”

“We haven’t practised in a while, what’s to say we haven’t lost our touch? Can you still do that thing with your—”

“Take it to your bunk!” Andy cries. “I am _begging_ you to take it to your bunk! We have to walk on that floor!”

Pete’s bunk is warm and smells of cheetos and errant masturbation. They stagger to Patrick’s bunk instead. On the sheets, they slide together, struggling from their clothes until they’re skin to endless skin and Pete can touch, gorge himself on the way Patrick’s shapes under his hands.

“Why did you follow me?” Patrick asks.

Pete shrugs, “Because I couldn’t be in a world that didn’t have you in it.”

Patrick’s brow furrows, he appears to be performing intensive mental arithmetic. For Pete, there’s no equation simpler: Patrick is the sum total of every decision he’s ever made, the loop of the dot-to-dot, the conclusion of the Magic 8 Ball.

“Do you want to maybe… try again?” Patrick murmurs shyly. His shyness is adorable with Pete’s hand around his cock. “Fuck, it’s kind of hard to think while you’re doing that, you know?”

“I love you,” Pete informs him seriously. “I want whatever those future versions of us seemed to have, I want the fairy tale,” Patrick winces, “okay, poor choice of words. But you know what I mean. I’ve fucked up and I’ve hurt you and I’ve made you feel like shit and I don’t want that anymore. To quote my own lyrics, I want to scream I love you from the top of my lungs.”

“But you’re afraid that someone else will hear you?”

“No,” Pete shakes his head. “I want _everyone_ to hear me.”

“If you don’t kiss me right now,” Patrick murmurs into the hollow of Pete’s collar bone. Pete gasps, sighs, possibly dies. “I think I’m going to toss you back into the hell dimension.”

“We can’t have that.”

_And they all lived_

_happily_

_ever after._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading along. Comments and kudos are always welcome or feel free to stop by my tumblr @sn1tchesandtalkers and say hi.
> 
> Until next time...

**Author's Note:**

> So, what do you guys think so far?
> 
> Comments, kudos and theories on where the fuck Pete has found himself are all welcomed! You can also come and say hi on tumblr [here!](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/sn1tchesandtalkers)


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